WHAT LIES BENEATH
Textbook...maybe a little TOO textbook

  Damn advertising.  About 80% of the plot for this movie is given away in the ads, leaving the audience to know in advance which clues are the red herrings (which climax in the biggest intended laugh I've had in a theater all year) and which might go somewhere.  What a rip!  But I can't hold an ad campaign against the movie itself, and I enjoyed What Lies Beneath quite a bit (and it scared the living shit out of every woman I know who's seen it, for some reason).

Michelle Pfeiffer stars, and she's mesmerizing to look at and listen to, finding a beautiful balance between expressiveness and control that you just don't see all that often.  She plays a recent empty-nester, having just shipped off her daughter to school, sharing a Vermont lakeside house with her husband (Harrison Ford, sporting a nasty wattle).  She's got a lot more time on her hands now, which she fills with sex, the occasional weep-session (over both her daughter and her more permanently departed dead first husband), and spying on the neighbors, who fight and fuck with tick-tock regularity.  She starts suspecting that something dangerous is going on there, so she starts spying, and isn't ready for what she sees when some sort of entity starts trying to make contact with her.

Director Robert Zemeckis has directed some scary-as-hell movies in his day (like Forrest Gump), and here he does a fine job, except that he doesn't seem to understand how dated a lot of what he's doing is.  Shots are set up so that we know exactly where to look for something to shock us (behind the fridge door, reflected on the right side of the water in the bathtub).  Only once does he throw a curve ball with his shocks, and even that is delivered by the same instrument as expected, just from a different direction.  It's not as bad as, say, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, partly because there's a lot more suspense leading up to the shocks, but Zemeckis still needs work at that.

What Lies Beneath touches on some rubber-reality clichés which I could just as soon have done without; that some things are only seen by certain characters for certain reasons is good, but some of it just adds up to nonsense.  What we see has to be interpreted to a degree; after all, ghost-visions happen aside from what's "really" happening, and our perception of them is inevitably clouded by Pfeiffer's dialogue which tries making sense of them.

The ending was also totally silly; oh, I liked the revelations (hokey as they were), but the resolution was...it was bad, people.  Starting out like Rear Window and turning into The Sixth Sense, hey, that's cool by me; it's when it ultimately turns into Fatal Attraction that I found myself totally outside the movie again and waiting for things to wrap up, though I suppose I should be grateful nothing came of things with the pointy prow of that sailboat a la Jaws: The Revenge.  And I don't know what the point was of that accidental-electrocution scene.

I keep getting the feeling that this was based on somebody's novel, but no "based on..." credit turns up when I look for it.  I'm giving a qualified recommendation for this one; it's really a horror movie for people who either don't like or just never see horror movies, and as such, works really well.  For those who've been happily immersed in the genre for some time, though, it's not going to show you anything new.

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