Nathan Rabin on The Frighteners

Over at The AV Club, Nathan Rabin takes an in-depth look at Peter Jackson's The Frighteners for his regular feature My World of Flops, where Rabin finds something valuable in Hollywood's failures, like a prospector panning for gold.

In this beautifully written piece, he discusses Peter Jackson's unusual connection to Steven Spielberg via Robert Zemeckis, Michael J. Fox's last role as a leading man and even traces the origins of the CGI-laden Lord of the Rings trilogy.

The Frighteners sometimes feels like nothing but an endless series of special effects-intensive set pieces; the technology seems to be driving the story rather than the other way around. It’s a film of tremendous strengths—ingenuity, a certain morbid wit, technological daring, an unmistakable, fully formed sensibility—and equally formidable weaknesses. It’s a riot of competing, sometimes clashing components angrily crying out for attention. It feels sometimes like the work of someone who wants to use all of his tricks and play with all of his toys in case he never has the opportunity to do so again.

(I need to give a shout out and thank you to Greg Bennett, @soundslikecin, who linked to this article on Twitter, where I discovered it.)