The Frighteners

Directed by Peter Jackson
A Universal Pictures Release

recommended

Peter Jackson's The Frighteners is a rare thing, an intelligent, funny, dynamic movie. It even has ideas. It also has Michael J. Fox, but really, that's okay here. As "psychic investigator" Frank Bannister, Fox gives a deft and understated performance, no small feat in a film where he's interacting with bluescreens more often than he is with people or even machines (just think of all the dopey drop-jawed reaction shots you've seen in recent special effects-heavy films, and you'll get a sense of what I mean).

Frank's con is a trendy one (post-Ghostbusters and post-X Files): after a near-death trauma some years ago (one which involved the death of his wife, for which he feels extremely guilty), he can see and communicate with ghosts. So he and three of them (played by Chi McBride, Jim Fyfe and John Astin) scam neighbors and newcomers alike: the ghosts make ooky noises and shake up household appliances, the afflicted homeowner calls Frank, and he — after a lively, thingamajiggy-jazzed performance — declares the place "clean," for a fee of course. (The team also has a side business in allowing grieving relatives to speak to the recently departed: Frank shamelessly passes out his cards at funerals.)

While all this might provide the entire plot of someone else's movie, for Jackson (whose previous films include Dead Alive and Heavenly Creatures), it's only the beginning. Working from a story he wrote with his partner and wife, Frances Walsh, the filmmaker weaves unconventional characters, circumstances and pop cultural references — not to mention a completely delightful assortment of CGI-model bluescreen effects and beautifully conceived sets — into a kind of expedition across a weirdo mindscape. It's subjective but it's also drawing from a variety of obvious and non-obvious sources — ranging from Norman Bates, Freddy Krueger and Tales from the Crypt to Charles Manson, The Haunting, and Natural Born Killers, among others. The movie never stays still long enough to get predictable (except in its general romance frame, but what can you do?).

It's hard to distill the plot to a few lines, it twists and turns so continually. Suffice to say that it involves a haunted house (really haunted, not by Frank's crew), a social worker (Trini Alvarado) who is trying to help the woman (Dee Wallace Stone, who is perfect, and it's good to see her again) trapped in that house, a serial killer (Jake Busey), and a terrifically goony FBI agent (Jeffrey Combs, playing what might be called the anti-Mulder) hot on the trail of Frank, whom he believes to be a ruthless murderer. In other words, there's too much going on here to lay out in a straight line. The slides between past and present, between bodies (the ghosts here are constantly renegotiating their relationship to the material world), between life and death, all make the movie pretty much nonstop, culminating in an especially trippy final action sequence.