Get your own Free Home Page
Whoulda thought. Just when the cool reception for Scream scribe Kevin Williamson’s Teaching Mrs. Tingle seemed to close the lid on the late 90s horror boom, which he pretty much singlehandedly started three years ago, the trend remade itself by taking a turn toward maturity. Last week the three highest-grossing films were supernatural thrillers with at least one principal character over 40 (which means, now that Hollywood has taken notice of the latest sure thing, next year we’ll probably see something like Exorcist 4, starring Katharine Hepburn as a victim of demonic possession who really likes pea soup, and Ghostbusters 3, with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon trying to debug a haunted shuffleboard court...although, since two of those top three feature children who commune with the dead, maybe, rather than that stinker a few months back illustrating how low Kathleen Turner’s fortunes have sunk, Baby Geniuses, we should be on the lookout for baby mediums; don’t be surprised if you see a remake of Ghost starring Reese Witherspoon’s as yet unborn child reprising Whoopi’s role). Stigmata knocked the summer’s biggest surprise, The Sixth Sense, out of the top spot it had occupied for five weeks.
And Stir of Echoes came in third. Based on a 30-year-old novel by Richard Matheson (who deserves an article in his own right, since he wrote or provided the basis for 20 of the original “Twilight Zone” episodes, and his books have been getting turned into movies for three generations of filmgoers: The Incredible Shrinking Man; The Last Man on Earth, which was also done as The Omega Man with Charlton Heston, and may yet be realized again as a Schwarzenegger project; Somewhere in Time; and What Dreams May Come, just naming a few), Echoes quickly settles into a pace that is more gritty and substantive, if less eye-catching, than the other new chiller this week. Kevin Bacon is Tom Witzky, a Chicago telephone lineman, aspiring part-time musician, and reasonably happy family guy whose chief regret is “I just didn’t expect to be so ordinary.” One chilly autumn night he reluctantly lets his hopelessly divergent, ungrounded sister-in-law Lisa (Illeana Douglas) hypnotize him to enliven a neighborhood party, coerced by too many beers and her cheery “What’s the worst that can happen? I’m practically a licensed hypnotherapist.” In an engrossing scene that almost had me ready to bark like a schnauzer, she gets him to imagine he’s in an empty theater looking at a screen with “SLEEP” in huge block letters -- and the next thing he knows he’s awake and everybody’s amazed. He goes home and promptly bumps into the supposedly imaginary friend he and his wife Maggie (Kathryn Erbe, from “Oz”) have heard their young son Jake (precocious first-time actor Zachary David Cope) conversing with. It turns out Lisa left a seemingly innocuous suggestion in his head, that he be more “open-minded,” but now he’s tuned in to the spirit of a local girl who’s been missing for several months. And, like the ghosts in 6thS, this specter gets increasingly more insistent as her request goes undeciphered and unmet -- only, since Tom is a blue collar guy rather than a noted psychotherapist, rather than just making him moody and withdrawn, this supernatural obsession drives him to more noisily alienate his wife by literally tearing apart the house and yard looking for answers to the incomplete clues in his visions. He will eventually unearth a secret with shocking, tragic implications for the entire neighborhood.
Adapted and directed by David Koepp (who contributed to the scripts for Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible, and Men in Black, and lensed The Trigger Effect), Stir of Echoes is in some ways an earthier, more personal thriller than either The Sixth Sense or, certainly, Stigmata. It does suffer, though, from characters given to revealing themselves more through sudden and convoluted behavior rather than careful development. And there is one glaring plot hole that still has me wondering if I missed something, divulged in the following SPOILER ALERT -- DO NOT READ THIS: in the fake finale one distraught character stands holding a gun in an empty room; we hear a shot, then silence, and a few minutes later this same character returns apparently unharmed to resolve the real climax. Was it a ghost? Can ghosts handle guns? If so, why didn’t the ghost of the girl just take a Glock 9mm and -- oh, nevermind. C
Get your own Free Home Page