It is too early to tell whether The Lord of the Rings is going to be remembered as one of the most successful film trilogies of our times. What is clear today is that the mere fact of being made represents its creator's great achievement. Convincing studios to spend hundreds millions of dollars, shoot three films simultaneously and then gradually releasing them in three years - all that required great deal of perseverance and courage from a film maker, especially a film maker whose resume included titles like Bad Taste or Meet the Feebles. Peter Jackson, however, managed to win over sceptics, even after his first mainstream effort – 1996 supernatural comedy The Frighteners - turned out to be disappointment.
The plot of The Frighteners is set in small Californian town of Fairweather. Frank Bannister (played by Michael J. Fox) is psychic investigator specialised in exorcising ghosts from the haunted houses. Frank is, of course, a con man, but he can actually see ghosts - however, he had befriended some of them and devised scheme in which they haunt houses thus allowing him to make money. This scheme is threatened when many young citizens of Fairweather begin to die from heart attack. One of the victims is Ray Lynskey (played by Peter Dobson), Bannister's former client, and this is reason enough for FBI Agent Milton Dammers (played by Jeffrey Combs) to treat Bannister as suspect in murder investigation. In an attempt to clear his name, Bannister discovers that the deaths might be the work of executed serial killer and that Lynskey's widow Lucy (played by Trini Alvarado) might become one of the victims.
The most impressive thing in The Frighteners is the large number of breath-taking special effects who were state-of-the-art in its time. Everyone would agree that the effects used in this film served Peter Jackson very well in developing even more spectacular visual magic for The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Unfortunately, those effects didn't serve this film that well. Instead of making the film more attractive, they simply managed to smother the plot and characters. They look too much like the recycled versions seen in of earlier, visually less impressive but more honest and effective supernatural comedies like Ghostbusters or Bettlejuice. Comedy and horror require fine balance to mix well, and this balance wasn't achieved in The Frighteners. There are some glimpses of interesting characters and subplots; Jeffrey Combs is effective in the role of creepy FBI agent, while Michael J. Fox plays world-weary psychic con man very well. But despite all that film is disappointing; although it can entertain audience at the end of the day, hardly anyone would judge it as even remotely memorable title in Peter Jackson's opus.
RATING: 5/10 (++)
(Note: The text in its original form was posted in Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.films.reviews on November 7th 2003)
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