The Frighteners
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Movie Reviews of The Frighteners
Movie Review: Fantastic!!
Summary: 5 Stars
What a great combination of humor and horror. I lept out of my seat and laughed so hard I cried!I recommend this one!
Movie Review: R Lee Irmey
Summary: 5 Stars
I love anything that has the old GUNNIE in it. Also this is a very funny/scary movie!!!!!!Movie Review: slap it on blu-ray....
Summary: 5 Stars
i cant wait until they put this jewel on blu-ray this is an awesome movie....Movie Review: Movie
Summary: 5 Stars
Purchased as a gift fot my hubby to add to his collection. Loved the movie.Movie Review: I do, I do, I DO believe in Spooks!
Summary: 4 Stars
Less of a feature film than an audition reel of what New Zealand wunderkind director Peter Jackson could do with a decent budget, "The Frighteners" is a jauntily paced little spookshow with Michael J. Fox in the lead as a paranormal researcher, exorcist, entrepreneur, and great chum to ghosts, who runs a lucrative little enterprise as an "exorcist" who evicts the very poltergeists who serve as his friends and houseguests. Sheesh, to think what the Ghostbusters might have done had they cut those ectoplasmic pests in on a piece of the action.
Let's be honest here. As much as I adore and savor the works of Peter Jackson---particularly "Dead/Alive" and "Bad Taste", low-budget splatter-flicks helmed well before he was a Hollywood maven and Tolkien-resurrecting powerhouse---"The Frighteners" is a sketchy, chaotic, massively flawed film that is all over the map.
That doesn't mean it's not fun.
Quite the contrary. "The Frighteners" is an inventive little romp into soul-stealing and besides, it has Jeffrey Combs as a feral, uber-paranoid, necromantic FBI agent, which alone makes it worth a rental. Michael J. Fox turns in a jolly performance as Frank Bannister, a con-artist who capitalizes on his winning relationships with a trio of accommodating spooks (including the great John Astin as "The Judge").
Producing poltergeists---and exorcisizing them---is big business until Bannister runs into the real thing, a Collector of Souls that eats ordinary ghosts for breakfast and throws his ordinarily profitable existence into turmoil. It seems mass murdering grinning-until-the-end asylum guard Johnny Bartlett (a fine turn by Jake Busey) died a miserable death in a mass murder spree, and somehow all of this ties into a ghoulish spectre that sucks the life out of hapless mortals.
Add in an inspired performance by Jeffrey Combs as a paranormal and exceptionally sensitive FBI agent ("What? Ah-ha, now you're trying to stop *my* heart!"), and some genuinely startling special effects, and you have a jolly mishmash of a horror movie that really doesn't know when to stop. That's part of its fevered charm, right to the the final confrontation, though Busey looks far more malefic when covered up in a shroud.
What will you get out of "The Frighteners"? First, this is a schizophrenic movie: Jackson shows off Wingnut's ability to deliver on a wide range of highly startling effects. Second, Jeffrey Combs steals the show, and right down to his final moments on Earth is a laconic, paranoid, inches-from-a-nervous-breakdown wreck of a paranormal investigator. I want to Believe!, indeed.
Let's be honest: "The Frighteners" won't change your life, won't scare you, won't threaten your brain with an aneurism brought on by too much spectral derring-do. But the effects are stellar, the acting is uniformly competent, and the plot, while muddled, is jolly fun.
Will it change your view of the universe and shift your political outlook? Absolutely not. Will it entertain for nearly two hours? Totally. Could you ask for more? Possibly, but for a special effects real that led Jackson from his uber-disturbing but underrated "Heavenly Creatures" to helming up "Lord of the Rings", let's not get picky.
Is "Frighteners" worth a look? Absolutely. Dust off your Ouija Board, repeat "I do, I do, I DO believe in spooks," sit back and relax, and get ready for some spectral, frantic, ectoplasmic goodness seasoned with some startling special effects and served up with a few perfunctory scares. Boo, even.
JSG