Speaking of movies I haven't watched in a while, I got The Frighteners for free with my HD-DVD player way back when and it's been sitting on my shelf since then. So I figured that I'd get into the Halloween spirit with some scary movies and watched it again for the first time in 10 years. And amazingly, it was pretty great! I remembered it the first time as something of a cross between Ghostbusters and Evil Dead or something, and that the shift in tone halfway through the movie was really off-putting. Well I don't know if the extra 16 minutes in the Director's Cut fixed that or what, but I thought it moved pretty smoothly from the goofy con artist set up into the "Jake Busey trying for the serial killer record" payoff this time around and I had a blast all the way through. Maybe it's because I knew the change in tone was coming this time, I dunno.
Of course, there's still major problems with it. The opening scene makes absolutely no sense in the context of the rest of the movie now (Why would the Reaper be haunting that house?) and overall it feels like he could have very easily made two very good movies out of the concepts presented here instead of smooshing them together into one big idea. However, the awesome Jeffrey Combs is so much fun as the weird FBI agent and the later scenes with Frank shifting in and out of the hospital flashbacks are powerful stuff, even if the comic relief ghosts at the beginning feel like they're from a different movie by the time you get to the end.
Definitely deserving of the "cult classic" label and a clear sign that Peter Jackson was ready for bigger and better things at that point. Check this one out if you're never given it a chance due to the crap reviews it originally got.
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Tags: Cinema, DVD, DVD Reviews, HD-DVD, House
I always thought this one was under appreciated. To me, the marketing was a big part of the problem; as I recall, they pretty much advertised it as a straight-up comedy.
Funny, I watched it again for the first time in a long time about a month ago on Starz. I agree, it’s a great flick, and you can see the manic-brilliance of Jackson in several places. I’ve always thought that Comb’s FBI agent would be closer to what you’d see in a real world version of The X-Files that the suave Mulder.