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.
The Frighteners
Critic Rating
(read reviews)User Rating
- New Zealand,
- United States
- 1996
- · 110m
Director
Peter Jackson
Cast
Michael J. Fox,
Jeffrey Combs,
Jake Busey,
Chi McBride,
Trini Alvarado,
Peter Dobson
Genre
Comedy,
Horror
After his wife's tragic death, former architect Frank Bannister gains the ability to see and communicate with ghosts. He makes friends with a few of the ghosts and runs cons with them. However, when a serial killer's ghost begins committing murders in his town, Frank will have to put his powers to good use.
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What are critics saying?
70
Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan
Saucy, scary and pleasantly unsettling.
67
Austin Chronicle
A thoroughly preposterous movie that's as outrageously entertaining as it is relentlessly chaotic.
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.
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
Variety by Todd McCarthy
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.
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.
42
The A.V. Club
An overlong, overstuffed mess with only sporadic moments of clarity and purpose.
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.
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