A horror movie that wants to be a rollicking comedy. Now that's a scary thought.
With The Frighteners, New Zealand director Peter Jackson wants it all. He wants big scares and even bigger laughs.
He gets both for a while but ultimately he gets neither.
The Frighteners opens with a truly creepy sequence in which a sex-starved poltergeist chases its prospective victim through an old mansion.
It's a scene right out of the classic 1963 ghost story The Haunting.
Faster than you can say Ghostbuster, The Frighteners veers off into Beetlejuice and Casper territory.
Frank Bannister (Michael J. Fox) is a con man posing as a ghost exterminator.
Bannister is in cahoots with a trio of ghosts who failed to follow the light into eternal bliss so are condemned to wander earth for a while more.
Bannister sends his ghostly trio off to a home and when the owners are suitably terrified, he arrives to exorcise the spirits.
It's fun and lucrative for Bannister and mildly amusing for the audience because the ghosts as played by John Astin, Chi McBride and Jim Fyfe are as irreverent as they are gruesome. Bannister's little scheme gets complicated and dangerous when a truly malevolent spirit starts claiming victims of his own.
Here's where The Frighteners tries to emulate Poltergeist and any number of the teenage slasher movies about ghouls who refuse to die.
There's also a mystery brewing. The audience is supposed to try to guess who the grim reaper is and who his human allies are.
With all the earlier guffawing at the outrageous ghost antics, it's pretty difficult to pick up the clues.
Try as he may -- and that means liberal doses of gore and violence -- Jackson can't get the chills and screams he's after.
There's no real sense of danger and shouldn't be. It would have been unfair and cruel to tickle the audience's collective funnybone only to bash it against a brick wall for effect.
Fox tries to walk the tightrope between fantasy and drama but, like Jackson, he goes for the cheap laughs too often to be taken seriously.
This is not to say that The Frighteners isn't fun and even genuinely chilling at times. It just needed to decide what it wanted to be.
The film's schizophrenia is its undoing.
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