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| Images courtesy of Arrow Video |
After splattering brains and entrails all over with his
tongue-in-cheek low-budget horror triptych starting with Bad Taste, Meet
the Feebles and Dead Alive, New Zealand writer-director Peter
Jackson formed the legendary visual effects company Weta Digital which began
work ostensibly on Jackson’s fourth feature film Heavenly Creatures, a
critically acclaimed crime drama that moved the filmmaker as far away from his
initial splatter horror roots as possible.
Though Weta Digital was only in its infancy, the 1993 founded computer
animation company’s third feature debatably proved to be Peter Jackson’s first
real brush with Hollywood in the Robert Zemeckis produced The Frighteners made
in 1996.
Starring Michael J. Fox fresh off of the Back to the
Future films with the horror-comedy sense of Zemeckis’ Death Becomes Her,
the project was originally intended as a Tales from the Crypt spin-off
before Zemeckis relayed directorial duties entirely to Peter Jackson working
from his own script co-authored by Fran Welsh.
An ambitious, expensive project (the largest for Jackson at the time) in
post-production for eighteen-months for Weta Digital to complete the pioneering
visual effects, the $26 million film barely broke even at the box office but
still pointed towards Jackson as a figure who could do wonders with money and
eventually his efforts on the beloved and celebrated The Lord of the Rings trilogy
paid off.
Though perceived as a commercial failure at the time,
eventually The Frighteners garnered enough of a cult following to merit
a mammoth 4K package from Arrow Video featuring enough exhaustive extras to
merit a 3-disc set replete with theatrical and director’s cut versions offered
either in theatrical scope or open camera matte per the Super 35 negative and
two feature-length documentaries (including a 225 minute one ported from the
laserdisc box). For those who missed out
on the German 4K box, Arrow presents another shot at getting that disc release. Also included is a collector’s booklet which
reprints Jackson’s laserdisc introduction as well as original production notes
and two vintage 1996 articles from the American Cinematographer publication.
In this macabre R rated Ghostbusters by way of Casper
and just a hint of Back to the Future, Michael J. Fox plays Frank
Bannister, a huckster small-town American psychic/con man who following his
wife’s death in a car accident gains the sixth sense ability to see the
undead. Cynically, he enlists the help
of three ghosts named Cyrus (Chi McBride), Stuart (Jim Fyfe) and a gunslinging
spirit simply known as The Judge (John Astin) to stage fake hauntings on
unsuspecting people for extortion. However,
soon a malevolent entity seemingly in the form of the Grim Reaper begins
claiming the lives of people connected to Frank and the deaths are pinned on
him by eccentric FBI agent/madman Milton Dammers (a delirious Jeffrey Combs)
while the body count continues to rise. Only
induced flatlining proves to be the key for Frank to narrow down just what this
Grim Reaper entity really is and if he can stop the undead murder spree from
continuing.
At once scary and goofy, supernatural and self-aware with a
sense of humor and some quirky snark running through it, Peter Jackson’s The
Frighteners is not too far removed from Robert Zemeckis’ own riff on the
horror-comedy subgenre with Death Becomes Her. Though it doesn’t quite go for the jugular of
unrated gross-out comedy-horror Peter Jackson’s prior iterations did, it still
manages to have New Zealand doubling for the American Midwest, shot beautifully
in scope Super 35 2.35:1 initially by Alun Bollinger before a near-fatal car accident
forced John Blick to alternate cinematographic duties. The score by Danny Elfman is the kind of
thing you’d hear in a Tim Burton film which this also at times flirts
with.
The ensemble cast of Michael J. Fox, Dee Wallace Stone,
Jeffrey Combs and Jake Busey make up a fun mixture of offbeat, quirky and a
little crazy though Fox channels some of his Marty McFly energy into his
huckster psychic. The only distraction
comes in the form of an R. Lee Ermey military ghost Hiles cameo going right
into Gunnery Sergeant Hartman mode ala Kubrick’s Full Metal Jackson. Dee Wallace Stone features an unlikely turn I
won’t reveal here while Jake Busey looks like he’s about to plug into Zemeckis’
next film Contact as a protestor-turned-assassin. The most interesting, difficult-to-pin-down as
well as patently hilarious caricature of himself is Jeffrey Combs as the
disturbed FBI agent, more or less channeling his mad science from Re-Animator
and the way he interrupts the plot repeatedly is funnier than it has any right
to be.
Back in 2022, German company Turbine Media released their
own mammoth boxed set of The Frighteners in 4K featuring Dolby Vision
HDR and newly minted Dolby Atmos remixes and both cuts of the film as well as
the stacked upon stacked extras. Now
that version quickly sold out online and of course became a recurring commodity
among scalpers reselling stuff at a higher value. Recognizing this pattern, four years later
now here is Arrow Video’s own edition of the same featuring both archival as
well as newly rendered extras. While
some who already bought the German box are inclined to hang onto it, those who
missed out like myself will eagerly want to upgrade their prior copies to this
new 3-disc extravaganza. The long
awaited North American 4K premiere of Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners is
here and Arrow Video doesn’t dare disappoint on a technical and supplemental
front. One of the boutique label’s most
comprehensive packages dedicated to a single film they’ve unveiled since Wild
Style.
--Andrew Kotwicki
