Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Green Mile (1999) - Syrupy Collection of Great Character Actors

  The Green Mile was a film that was in a regular rotation for my mom and stepdad when I was growing up, so I saw it many times in the late 90s and early 00s. My love of Stephen King mostly comes from my dad, who owned the first King book I ever read myself in late elementary school (Skeleton Crew) and numerous others I looked at on his shelf all the time and showed me miniseries like IT and The Stand. However, my mom contributed a little bit too with the likes of Creepshow and some of his other 80s adaptations and of course The Green Mile. So I figured why not revisit it since I own it? My biggest problem with The Green Mile is one I share with its spiritual sibling in The Shawshank Redemption which is that it is just very sentimental and sometimes even downright corny. Movies seemingly designed to make middle aged dads get in touch with their emotions by layering that syrup on thick. There’s a place for that and I understand why people really enjoy it, but it just simply isn’t ...

The Cabin in the Woods (2012) - Funny, Fun, and a Little Bit Insufferable

  The late 00s and early 10s were a pretty good time to be somebody who loved cult horror films with a sense of humor. You had the likes of Trick r Treat, Drag Me to Hell, and my favorite at the time which was The Cabin in the Woods. Whether it was on pay cable or early streaming, the film became a regular fixture in the years I mostly just spent my time frequently re-watching the same movies and drinking far too much beer. Because of that, I’ve gone some years without watching it very frequently cause I got kind of burnt out on it in my 20s but I had this former Blockbuster rental Bluray copy that cost less than 2 bucks so I figured why not see how well the film holds up? The thing that hasn’t held up so well is how smugly in love with its own dialog and cleverness the film is in a way that immediately signals that Joss Whedon was a writer on it. There’s a certain too cute quality to a lot of Whedon’s projects that have made me not like them as much as other people do, sorry to ...

Titanic (1997) - A Tale of Two Movies, One Painful and One Great

  The first time I saw Titanic I was just a little kid, and I bawled my eyes out and then once I dried up I begged to see it again so we sat through that extremely long movie twice in two days. Our VHS copy was well worn by the time we upgraded to DVD, we watched it regularly as a family in the late 90s and early 00s. It is probably a quite vital piece of media when it comes to my love and respect and awe of grandiose filmmaking even though these days I maybe only watch it every 5 years or so. So since my parents got Paramount+ through their cable and it was the only film on there that spoke to me when I was first glancing through their library, I figured why not see how it holds up? Honestly, every time I do revisit the film I spend like the first two hours being painfully reminded why it is so rare that I do. I grew up with a mom and older sister, a very female oriented household, so trust me when I say I’ve heard my fair share of really painfully written and delivered romantic ...