Peter Jackson certainly made a name for himself with Heavenly Creatures and since then Lord of the Rings, so I was curious about checking out some of his older ones. Passing over Meet the Feebles I went with The Frighteners.
Michael J Fox is great, and the effects are mostly pretty good. But the story logic and gags are kind of off, as if Jackson was unsure what to give his audience. Should he be true to his roots and give us a real slasher flick, or a mainstream comedy with a few scary bits? In the end its sort of like Ghostbusters crossed with Scream. I mean, on one side of the coin you've got a bunch of ghosts making sexual jokes, and on the other side you've got a homicidal killer who likes to carve numbers into people's foreheads after murdering them. Every now and then it veers off in one of these directions and I can't help but feel it would've been better if it was more to the extreme one way or the other.
I watched this primarily to see Jackson's pre-LOTR work and I wasn't too impressed but if the mood strikes you for something really off the wall, you could do worse.
Michael J Fox is great, and the effects are mostly pretty good. But the story logic and gags are kind of off, as if Jackson was unsure what to give his audience. Should he be true to his roots and give us a real slasher flick, or a mainstream comedy with a few scary bits? In the end its sort of like Ghostbusters crossed with Scream. I mean, on one side of the coin you've got a bunch of ghosts making sexual jokes, and on the other side you've got a homicidal killer who likes to carve numbers into people's foreheads after murdering them. Every now and then it veers off in one of these directions and I can't help but feel it would've been better if it was more to the extreme one way or the other.
I watched this primarily to see Jackson's pre-LOTR work and I wasn't too impressed but if the mood strikes you for something really off the wall, you could do worse.