The Frighteners (1996)

Originally Reviewed

Thursday August 24, 2006

Prior to watching this film I was curious and somewhat excited to see exactly what a film with the broad mixture of horror, comedy and romance mixed in with the talent of Michael J. Fox and director Peter Jackson, would be like. Surely this strange combination would lead anyone to find intrigue in watching this film. The only problem is once you begin watching will it continue to intrigue or leave you utterly bored.

The Frighteners is the story of Frank Bannister (Michael J. Fox) who after the traumatic death of his wife, many years ago, obtained the ability to "see dead people". But unlike The Sixth Sense, these dead people didn't make him do things, he made them do things. Bannister became the local ghost buster, although most of his "busting" was all a scam as he had his small band of "frighteners" go around and scare people and then came to the rescue and relived the unspecting victims of some fake evil spirits, for a small sum of money.

An increase in mysterious deaths begins to set people on edge, and Bannister begins to see mysterious blazed numbers on the foreheads of future victims before their death. Ultimately Bannister's gift becomes his curse as his hunt to find and stop this evil renegade spirit leads the town’s people to believe him to be the murderer because he's always at the scene.

I have to admit The Frighteners turned out to be a huge disappointment to me. I'm a big Michael J. Fox fan and like about everything I have seen him in but this film takes campy to a whole new level. I was hoping for an actual scary movie, which would have been interesting to see Fox star in. Instead I received a very campy and very poor knock off of Ghostbusters.

My main problem with the film was the mix of genres. Trying to meld a horror, comedy, drama and romance all into one film, especially one with such a campy plot, is a recipe for disaster in my opinion. Now I know a lot of people like these kind of films, and if done right I enjoy a campy movie every once in a while as well, but one that is well within some boundaries. Campy films shouldn't be more than an hour and a half long, anything longer begins to drag tremendously and become completely boring, as did this film, with an ending that never seemed to want to come to a conclusion.

The acting in the film is sub par, the story is alright and the "mysterious" villain is no mystery at all if you read any short synopsis about the film. Fact of the matter is The Frighteners tries to be too many films in one and ends up killing itself in a jumble of mess. It's not scary, it's rarely funny, and it becomes tedious rather quickly. Chop this film down to a solid hour and a half and you have yourself a descent campy film. Don't let the big names like Michael J. Fox and Peter Jackson fool you. This was about the period of time where Fox started making bad films, and the pre Lord of the Rings days when Peter Jackson was technically unheard of.

The best parts of the film in my opinion were the scenes with Jeffery Combs as FBI agent Milton Dammers. Dammers is a complete psycho path, yet his character made me laugh the most. If you’re a Star Trek fan you might recognize Combs who later plays Weyoun on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Commander Shran on Enterprise. I thought overall his performance was by far the best in the film. In the end, I appear to be one of the few who ultimately found The Frighteners a waste of time. I'm simply a firm believer in if your going to intentionally make a corny film set a few limits because if you go overboard it only get old terribly fast.

4/10