STIR OF ECHOES
Echoes...echoes...echoes...
I can't believe that I just saw a trailer for a movie called Bats.
Two volcano movies, two space-crap-crashes-into-Earth movies, two CGI ant movies...these things always come in twos. Usually, at least one of the two is expected to make megabucks; but nobody really expected The Sixth Sense to do as well as it did. Strange that such a sleeper would have its own "twin" coming out at about the same time, but it did, and its name is Stir Of Echoes.
I wasn't sure what to expect from this movie - with source material from Richard Matheson, maybe you can't go all wrong, but the trailers basically made it look like The Sixth Sense with a whole lot of CGI. Heavily CGI'd horror, considering the demise of The Haunting, does not appear to be something anybody really wants. Fortunately, those ads were a little misleading; this is not an FX-heavy film like The Haunting, or even a character-driven movie like The Sixth Sense. Instead, we're given a little more plot; in the end, it wasn't what was needed, but it still manages to be a fairly entertaining film.
Kevin Bacon stars as Tom, a working stiff in Chicago with a wife (Brooke Adams deadringer Kathryn Erbe) and son (Zachary David Cope). They live in The Perfect Neighborhood (a fairly obvious clue that something sinister's going down), and if he doesn't have the perfect job (he's the guy you see up on telephone poles), well, at least he loves his wife and kid very much. Even though the kid's spending a lot of time talking to dead people (which Mom and Dad never notice).
One night, rather drunk at a party with the wife's sister Lisa (Ileana Douglas), he consents to be hypnotized by her as a party trick. And when he gets up and is told just how good a subject he was (great scene where they tell him what happened there), he feels awfully thirsty, and soon knows all too well why his kid is like he is.
Bacon's really good here; he'll never be much of a name draw, but he's a competent actor in his own right who can put in an exceptionally good performance when he wants to. Erbe sort of just stands there, alternating between total disbelief and sympathy, doing nothing really to support the film or move it along. But Cope is good as the kid; unlike the child hero of The Sixth Sense, Jake is perfectly at ease with his ability, and understands that other people are more frightened by it than he is.
It's Douglas who steals the show, however, as always. She's one of those perpetual scene-stealers who other actors probably hate being cast with.
Stir Of Echoes stumbles in its last act when it shifts into becoming a mystery regarding the unknown fate of a neighbor, a mystery whose outcome is hardly mysterious, and is not helped by the laborious scenes of digging and flashing-red lights that take us there. The flashback scene where we see what actually happened is very much reminiscent of one in The Dead Zone, but not necessarily in a good way (what's "Painted Black" doing here?). There's also an off-screen gunshot which is cheating, plain and simple. It's a shame to see such a good buildup peter out into such a routine climax.
But still, it's not enough to substantially dent my surprise at how much I liked this film. The Sixth Sense it ain't, but it tries harder at being a horror movie, which is a noble aspiration.
This movie is based on the novel of the same title by Richard Matheson (never read it - Matheson's books are even harder to find around here than Lansdale's and Ellison's). It was both adapted and directed by David Koepp, who does an admirably good job, despite him having written possibly the most inanely plotted movie of the 90's, The Lost World (a movie which somehow managed to impress me anyway).