42
An overlong, overstuffed mess with only sporadic moments of clarity and purpose.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
50
San Francisco Examiner by Barbara Shulgasser
The Frighteners is a gooey pastiche of Casper, Ghost, Poltergeist, Back to the Future (it's produced by Future director Robert Zemeckis), Ghostbusters, and episodes of Columbo.
50
San Francisco Chronicle by Edward Guthmann
Smothers whatever merits it may have had in a rush of bells, whistles, bombast and smoke.
50
Chicago Tribune by Gene Siskel
A dreary, needlessly violent and ugly comic thriller about a psychic hustler (Michael J. Fox) who gets more than he bargained for with his latest scam. Fox seems to be trying to get hip in the movies, and he's lost his way here.
63
ReelViews by James Berardinelli
Following director Peter Jackson's powerful, true-life matricide tale, Heavenly Creatures, The Frighteners falls short of expectations by being just one of many in the long line of 1996 summer movies.
83
Entertainment Weekly by Ken Tucker
The Frighteners is also that rare horror film that actually gets better as it proceeds; this scare machine has a heart and a brain.
70
Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan
Saucy, scary and pleasantly unsettling.
25
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
Last year, I reviewed a nine-hour documentary about the lives of Mongolian yak herdsmen, and I would rather see it again than sit through The Frighteners.
50
Story was originally conceived as an episode of Tales From the Crypt, and that is perhaps what it should have remained, as the thinness of the conceit shows throughout, painfully so in the first half.