The Frighteners (1996)

Frank Bannister (Michael J. Fox) is a psychic investigator that's only partially a fraud. Partially in that he can see ghosts, but he convinces some of them to do fake hauntings so he can bilk people out of money. Unfortunately, the town he lives in is experiencing a spate of deaths that initially look like heart attacks, but the hearts show no signs of damage. And Frank is starting to see glowing orange numbers carved in the foreheads of random people, that are not the doing of his pals Cyrus (Chi McBride), Stuart (Jim Fyfe), or the Judge (John Astin.)

I've watched part of this at some point in the past, but I didn't realize there was so much going on in it. Probably too much. Frank's not dealing with his wife's death. His scams. Lucy (Trini Alvarado), a nurse who thinks Frank is legit and whose husband ends up a victim. A ghostly killer (Jake Busey.) An FBI special agent (Jeffrey Combs) gone entirely round the bend from too many years investigating paranormal cult shit. A woman kept trapped in a house by her authoritarian mother. There's even a bit of a subplot about the local newspaper publisher gunning for Frank.

Peter Jackson really tries to make it all fit, shifting focus from one thread to another. The newspaper publisher as another suspicious nail in Frank's coffin, removed from the table once we've got the FBI agent as an immediate physical threat to go with the supernatural one. And then saving the reveal of the truth about the woman and her mother for late in the film, to introduce a different physical threat. Lucy's there as the one person who believes in Frank, including Frank himself, but also to provide medical knowhow required later on.

(Curious to me Frank keeps watching people's hearts stop in front of him, but never considered trying chest compressions.)

But I don't think Jackson quite pulls it off. When characters die, or whatever you'd call it in that case of the ghosts, it doesn't feel impactful so much as them just sort of, dropping out of the film because Jackson ran out of use for them. The ghost of Lisa's husband feels pretty important in the first half, and then his spectral face gets ripped off and he's just gone. Even if he clearly had a different impression on the health of their marriage from Lisa, he did care about her in his own way, but he's just tossed aside. It felt like Cyrus and Stuart's sendoffs should have gotten more emotional heft as well, considering they were the closest thing to friends Frank had for several years.

Maybe that's just because I enjoy Chi McBride in everything he does. Always a delight. 

Fox actively tries to suppress the cocky charm he traditionally brought to roles, and I think he pulls it off. Frank is too surly towards the ghosts, and mostly too lazy in his interactions with other people, to really be charming. He's just going through the motions, everything is a script designed to either quickly get to the part where they give him money, or quickly end the discussion. Lisa's husband is freaking out about being dead, and Frank is describing how he'll have another chance to go into the light in a year, and he's going to excrete ectoplasm until then with the air of a man late for a bus.

I'm less sure Fox pulls off the turnaround to "guy who does care, actually," in the final stretch. Frank still just seems kind of tired, but maybe that's the point. He at least understands what happened to his wife, so now he got no objections to joining her. He has to get some closure on that front before he can really open himself up again.

The special effects and CGI are, well, it's the mid-90s. Some of the stuff with how the ghosts' bodies are manipulated (getting temporarily flattened by car tires, for example), doesn't look too bad. The "Reaper" look for Busey is pretty good, as compared to the translucent blue glow thing most of the ghosts get. The bits where ghosts are interacting with physical objects, picking up children or post-it notes, well, Who Framed Roger Rabbit did that stuff better in the '80s.