THE FRIGHTENERS
A film review by Shane R. Burridge
Copyright 1997 Shane R. Burridge
The Frighteners (1996) 105 min.
I suspect Peter Jackson's latest offering will mark a division between his fans. There will be those who accuse him of copping out with a commercial soft sell (Michael J. Fox? In a Peter Jackson movie??) and there will be others happy to see the larrikin New Zealand film-maker getting his foot in the Hollywood door.
Jackson and co-writer Fran Walsh (who'd collaborated with him on his earlier film HEAVENLY CREATURES) have thrown together a grab-bag of ideas for this big-budget comic thriller. Fox plays Frank Bannister, a conman who makes his living performing fake psychic cleansings house-to-house in the small coastal town of Fairwater. He is aided in his work by three less-than-enthusiastic spirits who are awaiting their crossover to the `other side'. Apart from an unrecognizable John Astin, this ghostly trio doesn't provide as many laughs as they should, and Fox's familiar mannerisms don't promise to lift THE FRIGHTENERS much above the level of a ho-hum supernatural sitcom. But not all is lost. Jackson soon shifts gears, and as things begin to get serious, so does Fox - his performance improves as the movie goes on. Oddball characters begin to spring out of the woodwork (notably an unhinged FBI agent played by Jeffrey Combs), and the plot takes new turns: Bannister is trying to help nominal love interest Lucy (Trini Alvarado) cope with the recent death of her husband; Lucy is trying to help a housebound woman (Dee Wallace Stone) escape from her domineering mother; the local sheriff is trying to find the cause of a series of fatal heart attacks plaguing the town; FBI agent Milton Dammers is trying to pin the blame for these on Bannister. At the core of all this is a mysterious dark figure, at first glance the Grim Reaper (marvelously realized as a furious, flapping streak of robes), that is causing murder and mayhem throughout Fairwater. It's up to Bannister, of course, to stop it.
The most impressive thing about THE FRIGHTENERS is the amount that Jackson has managed to stuff into it. In fact there is almost too much of everything: plot, laughs, suspense, special effects, action, imagination. Its only puzzle is why, ultimately, it fails to impress. The fans of Jackson's earlier films BAD TASTE and BRAIN DEAD will be disappointed that his gore has now become computer-generated; fans of HEAVENLY CREATURES will no doubt see his new film as a step backward to his splatter days. But for every weak moment there is a directorial flourish that compensates (one of my favorites is a wild scene in a cemetery where all four protagonists are fighting each other off simultaneously); and who would have believed that a film touted as a comedy could contain a sequence as chilling as the one in which Bannister relives flashbacks of a mass murder? It is best, perhaps, to think of THE FRIGHTENERS as Jackson's Ghost Train. It is an amusement park ride of a movie, although one tailored to the director's own tastes. As Jackson himself laughs it off, "I went to Hollywood to make a movie, and I blew it". It's obvious that he saw his chance to grab the brass ring, and made the most of the ride while he could. As should any prospective audience of his new movie.
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