The Frighteners

Fun fact: The Frighteners was the movie that convinced executives at Universal to offer director Peter Jackson the chance to make King Kong (2005).  Why?  I honestly do not know.  The Frighteners is not a bad movie, but it doesn't scream "give me the keys to a blockbuster remake," does it?  We're talking about a Michael J. Fox film where he neither travels through time nor is a werewolf --- hardly the sort of thing that makes you sit up and notice.  And yet, there was something about this film that gave those movie execs faith in Peter Jackson's talent.  Of course, those same bigwigs also chose to move scoot up the release date of this film from October (which makes sense for a movie about ghosts) to July (where it could get crushed by Summer blockbusters), so maybe the answer to this mystery is that Universal only hired idiots.  Or, maybe The Frighteners is an underappreciated gem, a glimpse at what a moderately successful Jackson could do, back before The Lord of the Rings made him truly famous.

The Frighteners follows Frank Bannister (Michael J. Fox), as he operates a low-rent ghost-busting business out of his (unfinished) home.  Many of the locals consider Frank a con artist, and they're right --- just not in the way they think.  Following a car accident that killed his wife, Frank gained the ability to see and speak to ghosts.  In fact, a trio of ghosts --- disco gangster Cyrus (Chi McBride), classic nerd Stuart (Jim Fyfe), and Old West veteran The Judge (John Astin) --- are his only friends, as well as his business partners.

Frank sends his ectoplasmic buddies to haunt a place, and he shows up to "exorcise" them for a fee.  Things start to get weird for Frank shortly after meeting Lucy (Trini Alvarado) and her awful husband, Ray (Peter Dobson); Ray drops dead and starts pestering Frank, so Frank starts spending time with Lucy, only to fall in love with her.  Unfortunately, there seems to be a rogue ghost that is murdering folks around town.  Even more unfortunately, the FBI believes that Frank is the killer.  Worse still, the killer likes to mark his upcoming victims with a ghostly number on their forehead...and Lucy is lucky number forty-one.

Who can possibly clear Frank's name and save Lucy and the other innocent victims-to-be?  Frank.  It's obviously Frank.  He's the only one who can talk to ghosts.  Think about it.

The special effects in The Frighteners are probably the most memorable aspect of the film.  They still look pretty good, even if the CGI is a little dated now.  It just depends on how creative Peter Jackson & co. were.  For instance, the whole killer-pressing-his-face-out-of-the-wall bit wasn't that great.

MJF realizing that they're aping A Nightmare on Elm Street 12 years too late

Unfortunately, that bit was used a lot.  On the other hand, scenes that toyed with the idea of what ghosts could do or have done to them turned out much, much better.  When I think of The Frighteners, my mind doesn't jump to the killer --- I think about when a ghost got a blast of bug spray through the face.

That sort of creativity overcomes some of the technical shortcomings of the FX in general.  Granted, they aren't all examples of great special effects, but they are probably what you will remember about the film.

I will never forget shit stain Jake Busey face

The acting in The Frighteners is pretty much all over the place.  Michael J. Fox doesn't play angsty very well, and a lot of his character's mannerisms bring Marty McFly to mind.  He's still able to make the character likable, though, even when the script doesn't do him any favors.  Trini Alvarado played a paper-thin character, and she didn't do it very well.  I get it, her role was poorly written --- that doesn't excuse her lack of range.  Of the ghosts, Chi McBride, Jim Fyfe, and John Astin probably got the most screen time, but the most entertaining one was definitely R. Lee Ermey playing a (surprise!) drill instructor.  Yes, he's done this schtick before, but he does it well.

His likes could be "Blah, blah, blah, maggot!" and I'd still smile

I was surprised to find Jake Busey in a role that I liked him; he was completely over the top, but he doesn't play "convincingly human" well, so it fit him.  Another pleasant surprise was Jeffrey Combs getting a chance at a memorable role outside of the Re-Animator series.

Above: Combs as "An asshole with an uzi" --- actual movie quote

Combs was my favorite character in the movie.  His particular brand of crazy matched the tone of the film better than anyone else in the cast.

I'm not entirely convinced this isn't Combs' actual chest

I also enjoyed Peter Dobson in his role as a self-absorbed jerk.  Like Ermey, Dobson doesn't stray far from his comfort zone, but there is no denying that he is good at what he does.  It was also nice to see horror veteran Dee Wallace in a key role.  She hams it up a bit, but I think she did well, given the lines she had.

Director and co-writer Peter Jackson made an unusual film in The Frighteners.  It's not a straight-up horror movie, but it's not funny enough to succeed as a horror-comedy hybrid, either.  The main reason for this is a dumb script.

I mean, how do they expect us to believe a dementor got from Azkaban to Australia?

Some of it can be seen in the little moments, like a flashback to Michael J. Fox's character --- an architect building his dream house --- playing basketball A) in a suit B) with bad 90s skater hair C) on a court he put in before he finished his house, because architects LOVE basketball courts and D) on what appears to be a regulation -height hoop, despite being approximately 4'6".  Other times, the stupidity comes at you in the main plot, like when MJ figures out who killed his wife thirty minutes after the audience does --- and the film treats that moment like it's a revelation.  Hell, you can argue that the entire climax at the abandoned hospital felt rushed and under-explained.  If the script was wittier or funnier, the flaws in the plot wouldn't matter so much.  But it's not and they do.  Thankfully, Jackson knows how to film entertaining action sequences and goofball moments, or else this movie would be painful to watch.  And if you were expecting the acting to save this movie from it's plot, then you aren't familiar with most of Peter Jackson's work.  The Frighteners is at its best when it is being weird and goofy, but there's just not enough of those elements to make the movie stand out.

Chi McBride's last-ditch meeting to salvage the movie: everybody gets an afro

The Frighteners is undoubtedly a flawed movie.  It's too kooky to be scary, but not funny enough to balance dozens of murders.  The central concept is a solid one and Michael J. Fox and the ghosts are likable enough, but the picture doesn't gel as a whole.  Even Danny Elfman's score feels a little scatterbrained.  Is there a good idea for a movie here?  Yes.  Does The Frighteners pull it off?  Not really, but it's not offensively bad.  It's a good try that didn't quite work.

Am I the only one who watched Michael J. Fox's erratic driving in this movie and immediately blamed it on his Parkinson's?  And then felt kind of bad?

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

I can't say that I was super-excited for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.  Part of it had to do with my work schedule at the time I saw it --- a 12:01AM opening day showing during a time where I worked long and early hours every day --- and part of it had to do with the fact that I grew up with The Lord of the Rings books before I ever got around to The Hobbit.  While The Hobbit is charming and fun, it's not epic awesomeness.   Still, An Unexpected Journey was being made by the same people who made the excellent LotR trilogy, so there should be little to worry about, aside from a hilarious dose of homosexual undertones, right?  I was a little uneasy, though.  The Hobbit is not a particularly long book, and yet An Unexpected Journey is only the first part of a Hobbit trilogy, while the significantly larger The Lord of the Rings books were barely squeezed into one (very long) film each.  Doesn't it feel like Peter Jackson is milking this one a little too much?

In this prequel to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, we follow the young Bilbo Baggins (played by Martin Freeman here and Ian Holm in LotR) as he is enticed by a wizard, Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen), to embark on a dangerous adventure.  The goal is to help a clan of dwarves, led by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), reclaim the home of their ancestors.  Why does it need reclaiming?  Well, dwarves like to mine riches from the earth.  Dragons apparently like riches, too.  When the wealth of Thorin's granddaddy became well-known, a dragon decided to move in and fricassee anyone who interrupted his enjoyment of his ill-gotten riches.

Artist interpretation

Of course, they're not going to take on a dragon all alone.  To go along with Bilbo, Gandalf, and Thorin are a lot of other dwarves.  In case the preview didn't illustrate that point to you, here's an alternate movie poster:

Which one of them is the hobbit?

Bilbo isn't really built for adventuring; he's a hobbit, which means he is small and inexperienced with weapons and the dangers that fill Middle-Earth.  He's not ready to face trolls, orcs, or goblins, much less a dragon that could frighten battle-happy dwarves --- and he may never be ready.  This is the tale of Bilbo's struggles to find his place in the group and in the world outside of his home in Hobbiton.  Of course, something else important happens in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey: Bilbo finds that ring that everyone made such a fuss about in those other three hobbit-ish films.

The acting in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is good, but this isn't really a movie built around individual performances.  Martin Freeman plays a wonderful everyman, so casting him as the very suburban Bilbo was a good choice that paid off well.  As the audience's POV character, he did a good job being confused and frightened for the audience, and I thought he conveyed his character's emotional journey rather well.  Ian McKellen was good as Gandalf the Grey; he's obviously familiar with the part, but I liked that he was a little more temperamental and less wise in this film.  Of the dwarves, Richard Armitage was by far the most impressive; it helps that he got to play a bad-ass and didn't have to wear goofy facial prosthetics, but Armitage was awfully good at brooding, too.

***Glower***

Ken Stott was the next most interesting dwarf, as the white-bearded right hand to Thorin.  He didn't really do anything terribly cool, but he turned in one of the better acting performances in this series simply through his dialogue. 

Stott was so good that I almost never laughed at the Cousin It under his nose

Oddly enough, those two cover most of the acting amongst the thirteen dwarf characters.  You can argue that James Nesbitt had a few solid moments, or that Aidan Turner stuck out (if only because he looked like the heartthrob of the group), but they didn't really have much to do.  The rest of the dwarves made little to no impression at all.  A lot of actors from LotR came back for small parts, and they were all fine.  Elijah Wood, Ian Holm, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, and Christopher Lee showed up, said a few lines, and were gone again.  Andy Serkis reprised his role as Gollum and he was excellent.  Serkis really does a great job every time he puts on a motion capture suit, and I hope he one day gets some recognition for the pioneering work he's doing (fun fact: Serkis also served as a second unit director on these movies).  He doesn't steal the film, like he did in The Two Towers, but that's mainly due to screen time.  Note to Peter Jackson: there's always more room in the script for Gollum.

He's like Jell-O in that way

The only other actor worth mentioning is former Doctor Who Sylvester McCoy, who got to play Radagast, the batty wizard that was apparently named by a twelve year-old in 1992.  McCoy did a solid job with a goofy character, almost to the point where I forgot about the fake bird poop on his face.

Almost

The special effects were as stellar as you would expect from this series of films and these filmmakers.  It kind of sucks that this movie revisits so many things that we've seen before in Middle-Earth, because it gives a bit of a "been there, seen that" feel to the film.  Even with that in mind, the sets --- particularly the ancestral dwarf home --- are all awesome.  The CGI was excellent, even in the large battle scenes that clearly didn't have the actual actors fighting in them.  I wasn't a big fan of the makeup on the dwarves, though.  Too many just looked silly, even if they are faithful to how Tolkien wrote them.  It's not a big deal, in the big scheme of things, but it irritated me that there were bad guys who looked dirty and creepy...

...and then there would be good guys who looked like complete cartoon characters.

This is actually one of the better-looking dwarves

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about Peter Jackson's work on The Hobbit.  As far as his co-writing credit goes (the script was basically done by him and his partner, Fran Walsh), I was impressed that An Unexpected Journey felt like a complete story.  Bilbo and Thorin had decently crafted character arcs, there was a natural ending point, and there was no cliffhanger ending.  That's tough to do with source material that originally had only 310 pages --- and keep in mind that two more movies are on their way from that same material.  I have no idea what the next two films will contain, but I'm alright with the contents of this one.  If you're wondering where the hell Jackson and co. found the rest of the material to pad this story enough to get three movies out of it, that was touched on a bit in this interview Peter Jackson had on The Colbert Report:

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As a director, I was a little less pleased with Peter Jackson.  The tale was definitely told competently.  The movie looked absolutely gorgeous, and the pacing was brisk; while my mind keeps telling me that this story was stretched out, it didn't feel that way when I was watching it.  I wasn't a huge fan of the action sequences; without someone awesome to focus on (like Legolas in LotR), I was faced with a bunch of characters I didn't really care much about in situations that didn't seem all that dire.  Admittedly, part of that impression is due to the fact that this movie looks so much like the Lord of the Rings movies that it suffers when you compare them by scale --- having fifteen good guys fighting a handful of orcs pales in comparison to the odds faced in LotR.  But the problems are not just by comparison.  Less than a third of this cast was fleshed out at all, so their survival meant little to me. 

I only cared about the guy who isn't attending a rap-metal show at the Renaissance fair

That's on Jackson.  There is no excuse to have all these characters left undeveloped, especially when there are three movies to fill.  Another option would be to imply how unimportant some of them are, but each one has enough quirkiness to make the viewer wonder about them.  This movie also suffered a bit from a lack of truly stellar bad guys.  The goblin king was kind of gross, but he struck me as more of a bloated tumor than a credible threat.

He has a tumor the size of a grapefruit an obese cave dweller

The albino orc looked fairly cool, but he didn't get the chance to actually do anything cool.  He just posed and growled.  He was so underwhelming that the top Google image hits for him are either blurry or behind-the-scenes shots.

This was the best pic I could find of Azog, the Defiler.  I mean "best" in every way possible.

Sure, Gollum was awesome (again), but he A) wasn't the primary threat B) only threatened Bilbo and C) obviously survived, along with Bilbo, because they are both in The Lord of the Rings. 

My biggest complaint with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, though, is with its tone.  This story is not as epic as LotR, but it is being presented in the same way.  As Stephen Colbert pointed out, Tolkien tried to go back and write an epic version of The Hobbit, but was later convinced that it was a bad idea.  It seems odd that the filmmakers would make the same mistake.  There's enough grandiosity in Middle-Earth to make this an epic tale, I suppose, but it just doesn't seem like the right fit.

It troubles Gandalf, too

I guess the easiest way to sum this movie up is to say that An Unexpected Journey is missing a lot of the charm that I expected to find, going into the movie.  That doesn't mean that it is a bad movie, by any means.  It's just not what I expected or, really, wanted in a film adaptation of The Hobbit.  It is still a good movie and totally worth seeing.  There is a lot to like here.  In fact, there is just under three hours of movie to like here (and we have six more hours on the way!).  It's just not as overwhelmingly, jaw-droppingly fantastic as the Lord of the Rings movies were.  I think that is because this feels like a continuation of those films, instead of a new trilogy with its own identity.  Hopefully, the sequels will course-correct that a little.

A quick aside on the format of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey:  I have now seen this film in the standard 24 frames per second and in 3D 48 frames per second.  The former was a much better experience for me.  The 3D was fine when I saw it on opening night, but the action scenes looked terrible.  However, my experience doesn't match up with any of the other complaints I've read online regarding the 48 fps presentation.  Instead of looking like a video game, or looking "too real," or looking like the ClearMotion option on a Samsung TV, all the action looked like it was sped up.  It felt like I was watching something out of the silent movie era, or at least an action scene from an early James Bond movie.  My assumption is that someone played the 48 fps version of the movie at 24 fps (because that's how fast-motion scenes are conveyed in those other examples).  If you have a better theory, I'd love to hear it. 

Dead-Alive

Many, many years ago, plague rats on an isolated island managed to rape some tree monkeys, and the Sumatran rat-monkey was the result.  If you're not sure if this movie will meet your definition of good taste, just reread that sentence.

This is an early directorial effort from Academy Award-winning director Peter Jackson, so some people that are big Lord of the Rings fans might look to this earlier work as an indication of things to come.  They shouldn't.  Back in the day, Peter Jackson was known as a master of splattering gore, usually used for humorous purposes.  The term "splatter gore" alone should give you a pretty good idea of what this movie is about.

A Sumatran rat-monkey bites an overbearing mother (Elizabeth Moody) and infects her with a zombie virus.  Her son, Lionel (Timothy Balme), realizes that his mother has become a natural abberation (instead of just an awful person), but doesn't want to alert the neighbors or scare away his new girlfriend, Paquita (Diana Penalver).  His solution is to hide his mother in the basement.  As you might guess, that doesn't work out so well.  Mummy dearest gets loose, bites other people, and kick starts a miniature zombie apocalypse, focused on Lionel above all else.  Lionel isn't on his own, though.  Aside from Pequita, he receives zombie-fighting  aid from a local priest (Stuart Devenie), who issues the film's most memorable line: "I kick ass for the LORD!"  And then he gets bitten and eats the lips off of a woman zombie, who later bears his zombie child.  Let me tell you, the living dead love child of a zombie priest and a zombie woman with no lips is less cute than you might think.  In the end, it is ultimately up to Lionel to kill the zombies, stand up to his monstrous mother and earn the love of his girlfriend.

When this movie gets boiled down to its main concept, Dead-Alive (AKA Braindead in its native New Zeland) is a zombie movie turned around.  Instead of discovering zombies and trying to barricade them out of his home, Lionel opts to barricade them in, so nobody notices.  This opens the movie up to a lot of comedic moments, most of which are alien to traditional zombie movies, although not less gross.  For example, there's a scene that involves zombie puss and pudding that is worth pointing out, but probably not polite to describe in detail.  That's not the only type of humor, though.  There's some slapstick and there's some socially awkward stuff, too.  I wouldn't go as far as to say that there is something for everyone in this movie, but it's funnier than zombie movies tend to be.

The star of this movie is really the gore.  It's a zombie movie, so you naturally expect to see some heads get blown off, but I don't think (though I could be wrong) there is a single gun used in this film.  Instead, the gore is very personal, and it gets all over.  When the zombies attack, they pull their victims apart.  There are many zombies that look relatively unmangled, but there are others that are less fortunate.  One might have just his head with his body always looking for it, another might have a torso with independent legs, and another might have had his chest ripped out.  These wounds don't happen off-screen, either.  You witness the violence, in all its glory.  The best scene involves a room full of zombies and Lionel resorting to a lawnmower shield to push his way through, but it is far from the only imaginative kill in this movie.

For such a gross, gory movie, the tone is surprisingly light.  Most of the time, gory films tend to have dark humor and rely heavily on the script for their kinda funny moments.  The lighter tone here allows the film to get away with a lot of socially awkward moments and visual jokes that are usually reserved for second-tier comedies.  Would this movie be any good without the zombie aspect?  No, the zombies, violence and gore are what make this worth watching, but the lighter tone makes it more fun.  How many zombie movies have happy endings?  Almost none, and there are even fewer that fans want to end happily.  Dead-Alive manages to walk the line between traditional zombie movie (excessive gore) and romantic comedy and still appeal to the hard-core horror fan, although it undoubtedly repels the traditional rom-com fan.

As time passes, this film becomes more significant in a historical context.  I doubt Shaun of the Dead would have ever been made if this had not.  This is also an early example of the special effects from the people who would eventually form the Weta Workshop, which did such a great job on the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  This is also an early example of Jackson's screenwriting partnership with his wife, Fran Walsh, with whom he writes all his screenplays.

Is this a movie for you?  It is a messy and gross movie.  I'm not particularly squeamish, and there are some scenes that make me wriggle in my seat.  Still, this is a unique film experience and it is interesting to see the obvious talent of the filmmakers and the special effects team in a movie that doesn't take itself seriously at all.  That's just an intellectual argument, though.  You know you should see this movie if you like seeing zombie movies and you enjoy a varied, humorous approach toward disposing of the undead.