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To most people, nerds and otherwise, the name Peter Jackson brings to mind four words: Lord of the Rings. The New Zealander’s epic, and standing at 4+ hours in total does qualify it as such, film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's seminal medieval fantasy series ingrained the adventure of Frodo and the Fellowship into a generation of moviegoers, for better or worse depending on your opinion of medieval fantasy. Before he single-handedly causing the mass orgasm of every D&D fan in the world however, Peter Jackson made...slightly different types of movies. Movies like Dead Alive and Meet the Feebles, which are filled with so much blood and pus that you would think you're watching a Looney Tunes cartoon written by a meth head and a bad creepypasta writer (so any creepypasta writer). It seems like such a leap from B-movie splatter fests to one of the most popular film trilogies of all time, but it’s not as unheard of as you might think. Sam Raimi started off with Evil Dead and went on to direct the Spider-Man trilogy after all, and Scorsese started off with Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and later cranked out Shutter Island and Hugo, so deviations from the norm aren’t all that uncommon. Rather than wading my way through the Feebles, for the purposes of this marathon I decided to try out the last film Peter Jackson directed before Fellowship of the Ring in 2001, which conveniently was a horror movie. Ladies and gentleman, it’s The Frighteners.
Here’s a fun little bit of trivia for you guys that you could’ve easily found on wikipedia: Aside from being the last film Peter Jackson directed before Lord of the Rings, this film was produced by Robert Zemeckis and starred Michael J. Fox, who of course were the director and star of the Back to the Future trilogy. This was also Fox’s last starring role in a live action film, according to wikipedia, before his early retirement due to Parkinson’s disease. A few years later he would star in a voice-acting capacity in Stuart Little and Atlantis: The Lost Empire, a perhaps unfairly overlooked film in the Disney animation legacy. Supposedly the original designs for Atlantis were done by Mike Mignola of Hellboy fame, which would have been awesome if it made it untouched all the way to the final product. Freakiest damn movie Disney ever would have made.
Anyway, Fox plays Frankie Bannister, a ‘psychic investigator’ living in a half-finished house on the outskirts of the peaceful town of Fairwater. The general opinion is that Bannister is a con man playing psychic so as to benefit on the grief of others, and in one regard they’re right: Bannister is indeed a con man on the grief of others for money, but he’s not playing psychic. He really can communicate with the dead, in fact he uses those spirits in his con jobs, using some legitimate poltergeist activity to goad people to pay for phony exorcisms. Pretty sleazy way to make a living to be sure, but when a series of strange murders start occurring across Fairwater, committed by what appears to be Death itself, Frankie is going to have to buckle down and try to not only save the day, but uncover the mysteries surrounding the town for years. Also there’s some romance and Jeffrey Combs (of Re-Animator fame) is awesome as always.
Although there are some genuinely creepy moments sprinkled throughout the movie, The Frighteners is primarily a comedy, falling within the lighter side of black comedy. The violence (which is largely relegated to the ghosts and crappy 90s cgi) is excessive to the point of camp, and as this a movie about death, the humour is often cartoonishly morbid. A more commercially friendly model of the comedic style seen in Dead Alive I’d imagine, which might have been the influence of Robert Zemeckis. I wouldn’t say The Frighteners is the best comedy on this list, but it is a pretty fun watch, and it might be for you too this Halloween.
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