Film Friday: The Frighteners (1996)

The Frighteners is one of those movies. It’s a quasi-comedy, quasi-horror film with a lot of great elements and I want to like this movie. But I can’t. . . not enough. Here’s where it fails.

** spoiler alert **

The Plot

Frighteners is the story Frank Bannister (Michael J. Fox), a former architect who now makes a living as a con-man psychic. Giving the story a twist, Bannister really can see the dead and he has made a deal with three spirits who help him hustle the local community by causing hauntings so he can swoop in to ghostbust the newly infected location for a small fee. Bannister is able to see the dead because he had a near-death experience when he drove off the road during a heated argument with his wife. She was killed in the crash.

As the story opens, the local community is struggling to understand a series of unexplained deaths. Each of the victims appeared to be perfectly healthy until they suffered sudden, massive heart attacks. One such victim is Ray, a jerk of a human being who has had a run-in with Bannister. Bannister agrees to help Ray and Ray’s wife Lucy connect so she can ask some questions about lost money. Lucy admits that she was never happy with Ray and she begins to fall for Bannister. That’s when Bannister sees a Grim Reaper-like figure. This is the being that has been killing people.

Bannister starts chasing the mysterious figure, but soon becomes a suspect in the killings and an eccentric FBI Special Agent (Jeffrey Combs) is brought in to question Bannister. This man is a specialist in cults and is more than a little insane. At that point, Bannister discovers that the Grim Reaper is actually Johnny Bartlett (Jake Busey), a noted local serial killer, and he and his still-living girlfriend have decided to continue their killing spree. The rest of the film involves Bannister and Lucy trying to stop Bartlett while avoiding the insane FBI Agent.

Why This Film Doesn’t Work

This film proves the adage that a successful film must be more than the sum of its parts. Indeed, if we just look at the parts of this film in isolation, you would think it would be a top ten film. Check out these elements:

● The Pedigree: Directed by Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame and produced by Robert Zemeckis, the director of the Back to the Future series and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Frighteners’s production team is stacked with talent who are more than capable of making this kind of half-comedy, half-serious film.

● The Actors: Michael J. Fox is one of the most likable actors of the 1980s and 1990s and he leads the cast. His presence alone should guarantee a solid movie. Add in excellent supporting actors like John Astin, R. Lee Ermey, and Jeffrey Combs and you’ve got a solid cast that should make for compelling viewing.

● The Effects: Peter Jackson’s visual effects company, Weta Digital, handles the effects and does an excellent job. The reaper figure is amazingly intimidating and intense. His ability to move beneath solid surfaces is creepy beyond belief. The ghost effects and how flawlessly they are mixed in with the live actors, plus the death effects and the numbers that appear on foreheads are all truly superb. Even the presentation of Hell is unusually well-done.

● The Soundtrack: The Danny Elfman soundtrack is solid, as is the remake of “Don’t Fear The Reaper.”

So this film has a lot going for it. Yet, it never quite hits the mark because the film never decides if it wants to be a comedy or a horror film, and that confusion keeps the film from being effective as either. Moreover, there are numerous problems with the writing which keep undercutting the story.

In many ways, one cannot help but compare Frighteners to Ghostbusters. Both involve ghostbusting and both straddle the line between comedy and horror. But this similarity hides a critical difference. Ghostbusters chose to be a comedy and made sure that each scene was played for laughs. It maintained a steady lighthearted tone floating just above a fairly heavy drama which let audience recognize the drama as driving the story but the humor as the true purpose of the movie.

Frighteners, by comparison, is not so clear. Frighteners vacillates back and forth between comedy and drama, with some scenes meant one way and others meant the other. Moreover, some characters are played for comedic effect no matter what scene they are in, until they suddenly aren’t played for comedic effect anymore. This is jarring and confusing and it results in an uneven movie that is incapable of developing a flow or a consistent tone. This means the audience can’t get its bearings to know how to judge the film scene by scene because they’re never sure if they’re supposed to laugh. Consequently, the jokes aren’t funny because it’s never clear they are meant as jokes and the drama isn’t tense because it’s never immediately clear that the scene is meant to be dramatic. Also, in the last thirty minutes, the film loses all pretense of being comedic and the entire tone of the film unexpectedly changes for the negative.

This problem is made worse by numerous mistakes in the writing. Some scenes don’t seem to advance the plot, such as his failed con-haunting of a rich woman. Too much of the movie feels too narrow in the sense that everything seems to happen to Bannister and it happens in a way which feels forced. But the biggest problem is really the lack of any sense of relationship between the characters.

Bannister has three ghosts who have agreed to work for him. But it’s never made clear why they do this. There is nothing they gain from this and if it’s friendship they crave, then Bannister is a horrible friend. It would have helped to see some warmth between them. Bannister and Lucy’s relationship isn’t much better. We’re told they fall in love with each other, but there’s little that shows this. Mainly, they seem like two people who are trying to help each other solve a problem. Moreover, there’s a very poor decision made by the writer when Bannister temporarily ends up in Heaven. When he arrives, he meets his former wife and they appear to be deeply in love with each other. She tells him it’s not his time yet to die and sends him back after suggesting she will be waiting for him. This is all well and good, but what does this do to the relationship with Lucy? Basically, it makes her into an affair.

The ending is a problem too. This is one of the earlier films I can recall which basically shut down the plot with about thirty minutes to go and turned the rest of the film into an elongated chase scene. This is sadly par for the course these days, but that doesn’t make this right. When a story based on the likeability of various characters ceases to be about those characters and instead becomes about a small group of people chasing each other through an abandoned hospital for thirty minutes, something has gone very wrong. And while the film interjects various goals for the characters throughout this chase, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s simply dull to watch people chase each other.

This is why I can’t like Frighteners even though I very much want to like this film. It has some excellent pieces, but those pieces are assembled poorly.