50 - The Frighteners

Connection To TOMCATS - Jake Busey.

Whether you prefer Peter Jackson, the early New Zealand made film years or the Hollywood years, I think depends how much you love his Middle Earth stuff because that single handedly takes about two thirds of it, it was hard to distinguish then because everything Jackson does gets filmed in NZ. From his early stuff I love Bad Taste, Brain Dead and Heavenly Creatures and I like Meet The Feebles, but his Hollywood career as shown what a magnificent filmmaker he is, even if the results where spotty (notably for me The Lovely Bones which was a huge disappointment) but the Hollywood path started all here with The Frighteners, a film that was box-office disappointment, if the figures I've read to be true it made $600,000 short of it's $30 million budget, but that's not taking into account advertising or in the plus column - home video.

So I saw this for the first time in 1997, I by that point was 14/15 and was already familiar certainly with Bad Taste (I saw Brain Dead for the first time a year later) so I knew it was an American film from that Bad Taste guy and I do for something reason, want to revisit every few years or so.

Michael J. Fox (which is last live action lead role to date I think) plays Frank Bannister, who was an architect who develops psychic abilities allowing him to see and communicate with ghosts after a car crash and his wife's murder. He then uses these abilities to work with various ghosts to cheat money out of customers for his ghost exorcism business. However a spirit is killing people and leaving numbers on the forehead as the Grim Reaper.

The film tonerly feels all over the place, it can't quite decide whether it's a horror-comedy or a horror with elements of comedy, this doesn't affect the enjoyment of the movie which I did enjoy very much it's just it's change in shift it sometimes a bit jarring. I think the films main killer was scary, I think that element would have still made a great film on it's own - the shooting of the hospital in the 50's, the Bonnie & Clyde element, the killer obsessed with numbering his victims. Michael J. Fox, I've always enjoyed him as a lead even in some of his less successful work (Greedy) and he carries the film well, he's got a cool backstory as well.

The supporting cast is pretty darn cool, Jeffrey Combs creepy insane performance as an FBI agent and the ghosts include John Astin as The Judge (who's falling apart) and R. Lee Ermey as a ghost drill sergeant (not a shocker really) among others.

Overall a good start for Jackson in the US, though some elements i.e the tone are sort of marks against it, but it really is a cool film at the end of the day.