Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

When I was in middle school, I was obsessed with watching Michael J. Fox’s whole filmography for a while and I missed this somehow. I first remember learning it existed by finding it in a roommate’s DVD collection, and I never got around to it. I also got it confused with Fright Night a few times.

Eventually I found out it was a Michael J. Fox comedy and I still never got around to it. I’ve read the summary at least once and completely forgotten it every time I read it. At least twice, I got as far as saying, “yes, I will watch this movie” and then I saw this poster and thought maybe it was a more serious horror movie than I’d thought, and decided to pass.

After watching the movie:

In a small midwestern town, ex-architect Frank Bannister operates as a paranormal investigator mostly seen as a nuisance conman by the community. He crashes his car into the fence of new resident Ray Lynskey and assures him he’ll pay for all the damage. That night, Ray and his wife Lucy experience a haunting in their house, and they find Frank’s business card, and Frank agrees to exorcise the house for whatever the fence costs plus materials. In reality, the haunting was staged by Frank’s business partners, ghosts named Cyrus, Stuart, and The Judge, that Frank gained the ability to see and interact with after a traumatic car accident where his wife was killed. The next day, Ray is dead, the latest in a rash of mysterious heart attacks in Lyttleton, and he goes to Frank to try to get him to fix it. Frank takes the opportunity to go out to dinner with Lucy and briefly acts as a medium, but soon brushes off Ray to try to scam Lucy more, until he sees a ghostly Grim Reaper in the restroom kill a man with a supernatural number on his forehead one higher than the number Frank saw on Ray the night before, and Frank runs out of the restroom chasing the phantom. The high number of deaths of extremely healthy people has attracted the attention of the FBI, and it doesn’t escape law enforcement’s notice that Frank left that restroom in a hurry minutes before the body was found, and he was one of the last people to see Ray alive.

I should not have put this off so long. This movie is exactly the comedy it was billed as, and kind of an inverse Ghostbusters. I wasn’t absolutely sure until the walking pot chicken in the haunting of the Lynskeys, and it was only after that scene that the real supernatural element of the movie was revealed. Fox plays mostly as a straight man to his ghost partners, but once the reveal happens, the tone is solidly established and it’s clear what kind of adventure we’re in for, which is a bit late, but still fun.

I was surprised to learn this was a Peter Jackson movie. In fact, it seems to be his last project before everyone in the moviegoing world learned who he was thanks to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It’s a little hard to see the comparison between the kind of projects he had after Lord of the Rings and this, but the ghost effects by Weta Digital are definitely pushing what was technologically possible. It’s not that difficult to record someone on a blue screen, desaturate them, and lower the transparency over the video that it gets paired with, but there is an extensive amount of such shots, the ghost design for this movie includes a neat refraction effect like rippled glass, and there’s also a ton of gags with ghosts experiencing cartoon violence that was done by great-for-the-time CGI.

The main place the movie didn’t work for me was Dammers, the neurotic FBI agent. Everything about Dammers’ characterization is supposed to be a joke, but between the neurodivergent behavior and the history of abuse that’s supposed to have caused him to crack, the alleged comedy aged like guacamole. Also Judge’s last scene has some uncomfortable jokes about him accosting a mummy and it’s too bad that that’s how a John Astin character goes out.

I have to agree with the consensus that this is an underappreciated movie. Few saw it in theaters (it absolutely needed a fall release date for the Halloween bump but got moved up), but has found a cult audience largely thanks to Jackson’s elevated profile. However, it’s still not as popular as it probably deserves as an innovative horror-comedy that pushed what was possible for the 90s and had a lot of fun doing it.