THE FRIGHTENERS (62)

Directed by: Peter Jackson

Starring: Michael J. Fox, Trini Alvarado, Jeffrey Combs

The Pitch: A conman posing as a "psychic investigator" - though genuinely psychic - becomes aware of a malevolent spirit roaming through the town, bringing Death in its wake.

Theo Sez: There are many astonishing things in this scrappy whirlwind of a horror comedy - the kinetic camerawork, the sheer inventive abandon of its mix 'n match sensibility, Jeffrey Combs' beyond-weird performance - but the most astonishing is perhaps how anyone could ever have thought of it as a potential summer movie. The tone is closer to this director's BRAINDEAD (with the gore - inevitably - diluted) than the well-oiled conventions that usually power movie rollercoasters : it is a ride, and an enjoyably wild one, but it lurches, going from tongue-in-cheek to spectacularly nasty, throwing in characters, like the trio of ghostly assistants, who turn out to be surprisingly peripheral, or - like the aforementioned Combs' deranged FBI agent - who carry so much unexplained baggage they seem to belong in a different movie of their own. Still an excellent example of Jackson's dynamic, not to say convulsive style - it's hard not to feel a surge of adrenaline when a line like "Cold! blooded! murder!" gets three consecutive zooms into the face of the person saying it ; and, when the scattershot approach stales, you can at least have fun speculating on the kind of childhood that makes oppressive mothers (invariably offed in unpleasant ways) so much a part of this director's movies. Not to mention a vaguely S+M sensibility (Combs freaking out if a woman yells at him) and the quiet kind of old-fashioned morality (or moralism), belying the frenzied style, which hung so oddly over HEAVENLY CREATURES, and which comes through here in a thoroughly bizarre Heaven-and-Hell climax that's probably the most daring thing in the whole movie. At times Jackson seems almost a variation on the Preacher in NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, using ideas of retribution and punishment as a shield for how inescapably drawn he is to sin and decay : the romance of Evil filtered through the values of remote, conservative New Zealand perhaps.