The behind-the-scenes presence of Peter Jackson, the New Zealander responsible for the highly respectable Heavenly Creatures and before that the deliberately disreputable Dead-Alive, adds a degree of interest to this ghost tale, even if some of that interest must take the form of dismay. His direction is incontestably high in energy; more concretely, his camera is high in mobility -- so much so that it fails to appreciate fully some of the special-effects scare tactics (e.g., the anthropoid shape that slithers along just under the elastic surface of floors and walls, an effect foreshadowed as long ago as Polanski's Repulsion, 1965). If this excess of energy often seems no more than hormonally adolescent, the impression is bolstered in other areas as well. The self-conscious jokiness of the thing -- a sort of Casper for slightly older and sicker kids -- shackles the movie to EC Comics or to cinematic facsimiles thereof: Creepshow, Tales from the Crypt. When, ultimately, it buckles down to the "serious" business of Good-versus-Evil,it drags itself to an even worse neighborhood -- that of the Elm Street series -- for the standard overextended climax. And the topping of the compulsory happy ending with an impossibly happier one (double happiness, if you please) makes you wonder whether it was really intended for older kids after all. Michael J. Fox, Trini Alvarado, Jeffrey Combs, Dee Wallace Stone. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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