Wolff rating: GOOD
Plot summary: ``Psychic investigator'' who can scheme with the spirits bilks his clients out of phony ``extractions,'' but he gets caught up in the life of a beautiful local doctor.
Biased, pithy comments: I can see the studio exec's office now---``OK, it'll be like `Back to the Future' meets `Ghostbusters,' only with fewer DeLoreans and a little more gore! Kids will love it!'' And, perhaps, they might have, if they were allowed to see it. With an R rating, this movie is neither fish nor fowl; it's too gory for the kids (along with far too many tours of ossuaries and mausoleums), but a little too cute and genial to be a typical slasher film. Thus, I can see why it pretty much choked at the box office. At the same time, I really liked the film. It's an antidote for the smarminess of typical ghost stories like ``Caspar'' or ``Ghost,''; instead, it's about people who are plainly dead as doornails. They rot, they live in graveyards, and they end up getting peculiar as hell after being dead a while. I find Fox pleasant to watch and Alvarado is a good actress who is finally given a good part to play. Combs is fantastically over the top, but overall the story itself isn't strong enough to overcome this film's lack of category. I did care about the characters---I was definitely worried as things began to come apart---but the final MacGuffin that we learn isn't really an ``aha'' worthy of the special effects extravaganza that preceeds it. Similarly, much of the view into the world of the dead is borrowed directly from other films, most especially ``Ghost.'' So, a flawed film that will appeal to a narrow audience (one that doesn't mind gore but doesn't want it to be the focus of the film, as well as having a tolerance for a scatterbrained script), but certainly one I found lots of fun. An excellent Halloween video pick.
Other Notes: And I'm not just saying this because there's a guy with my last name in the cast. Trust me, no relation.
How many times I have seen it: x1
Starring: Michael J. Fox, Trini Alvarado, Peter Dobson, Jeffery Combs, Dee Wallace-Stone.
Directed by: Peter Jackson