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The Frighteners (1996) - Michael J. Fox's Lost Sitcom (Derogatory)

 


I’ve had good luck recently with randomly picking films I thought I wouldn’t enjoy much but gave a shot and ended up really having a good time with, so I thought The Frighteners was a can’t miss prospect. I grew up the biggest Michael J. Fox fan and I worship the ground Jeffrey Combs walks on. Peter Jackson’s earliest films were all pretty good, I’d generally consider myself a fan of them, particularly Heavenly Creatures. It is billed as a horror-comedy, one of my absolute favorite subgenres to which many of my most beloved films belong. I genuinely believed I would at least mildly enjoy it despite its mixed reputation. Welp, I kind of hated it.

The biggest thing for me is how broad, obvious, corny and often just outright cartoonish all of the comedy was. Outside of a couple performances, the acting throughout was like the most lowest common denominator sitcoms of the era and the film’s sense of humor shared this quality twofold. I found myself outright cringing at times at some of the tired or childish gags, especially the stuff with the lead character’s ghost buddies who straight up feel like something out of a kid’s movie, and even Jake Busey whom I like a lot as an actor is pretty bad. The “plot twists” leading into the climax are so heavily telegraphed that anybody could have predicted them early on, but also somehow unnecessarily convoluted in backstory. The film’s very open and binary view of literal Heaven and Hell, especially towards the end, is really offputting in a horror film not steeped in gothic Catholicism but this is a personal squabble anybody’s mileage may vary on.

Living up to its reputation as a CGI heavy film before CGI technology was really quite there yet to look decent, the vast majority of the FX work beyond the obvious practical stuff looks so badly dated and is too loaded throughout every section of the film to be charmingly bad enough to look past like many films of the era. At times it can just look almost video game-ish and even at its best like the ghost effects still just looks too off and uncanny to be used as heavily as it is.

There are a few redeeming factors here, however. Michael J. Fox gives so much more grounded performance than anybody else as an amoral conman who happens to be able to see ghosts that it is like he’s in a different movie, but in one of his final major live action film roles he really instills the character with charming scumbag charisma that is the lane MJF always thrived in the most as an actor going back to his Alex P. Keaton days. Jeffrey Combs probably plays bigger than anybody else, but because he’s Jeffrey Combs playing big and weird and eccentric is the lane in which he most thrives and his performance as the occult-focused, obsessive, neurotic FBI agent manages to be one of the darkest and strangest and funniest things in what is supposed to be a horror film and consistently he steals every scene.

The film is really well directed beyond the issues with the special effects, kinetic to the point of even paying direct tribute to the Evil Dead series in a couple of shots, it maintains a lot of energy for the film when the other on screen results aren’t delivering, and it isn’t hard to see why despite this film being a disappointment Jackson’s reputation as a director remained strong enough to do the LOTR trilogy afterwards. And during the third act, even though I did not enjoy the ending, it really picks up and starts feeling a lot more like a legitimate scary movie that has real stakes with some high-octane action, like 20-25 minutes where I actually wasn’t regretting picking it over Mortal Kombat (potential future review?).

I was real disappointed. This film seemed to have all the ingredients from director to stars to tone and camp that SHOULD on paper be perfect for me. However, it reminds me a lot of my experience with another late Michael J. Fox film in Mars Attacks which was another that feels perfect for me on paper but in execution I actively disliked more than I liked it. I want to like any movie I watch, but especially this one, but I don’t think I will ever watch it again.

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