Movies - The Frighteners

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	Movies - The Frighteners

The Frighteners is a 1996 film directed by Peter Jackson about a psychic private detective who stands in the way of a serial killing death-like creature. As with his later films, Jackson filmed the movie in his home country, New Zealand. The film earned $16 million at the U.S. box office in July 1996. Sometime in 1998, director Peter Jackson, who went on to direct the Lord of the Rings
trilogy, commissioned Universal Studios home video to release a laserdisc special edition of the film (with a four and a half hour documentary) as well as a standard edition DVD. Some collectors spend up to $500 to get a copy of the out of print laserdisc special edition on eBay. A Director's Cut Edition DVD was released in December 2005, to coincide with the release of Jackson's film King Kong
. This edition included the 4 1/2 hour documentary and feature commentary of the laserdisc version, as well as a short introduction by Peter Jackson recorded for the DVD. The Director's Cut DVD set is available in Regions 2, 4 and 5.

Filming

The film's digital special effects are innovative, and can be seen as foreshadowing the Paths of the Dead sequence in The Return of the King
, which featured an army of ghosts.

One of the ghost characters is played by John Astin. His (adopted) son Sean Astin stars in the Lord of the Rings movies as Samwise Gamgee. In his book There and Back Again: An Actor's Tale (2004) Sean Astin cites his father's enthusiasm for working with Peter Jackson as the chief reason for his auditioning for the role.

(Sean Astin's daughter also appears in The Return of the King
as Sam's daughter Elanor Gamgee, so that Jackson has worked with three generations of Astins.)

R. Lee Ermey, playing the ghost of Sergeant Hiles, virtually reprises - not for the first time - his Sergeant Hartman role from Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket
.

Plot

After a car accident in which his wife was killed and he was injured, Frank Bannister (Michael J. Fox) develops psychic abilities allowing him to see and hear ghosts. He has put these skills to use by befriending a few ghosts, and getting them to haunt houses in the area, to drum up work for his ghost busting business. He then proceeds to 'exorcise' the houses, for a fee. But then he discovers that a Grim Reaper-like entity, later discovered to be the ghost of Johnny Charles Barlett (Jake Busey), is killing people one after another, marking numbers on their forehead beforehand. Because of the numbers, he can foretell the murders. This puts him under suspicion by the police. He tries to stop the murders, helped by a doctor and his three ghostly friends.

Cast

Frank Bannister: Michael J. Fox
Dr. Lucy Lynskey: Trini Alvarado
Ray Lynskey: Peter Dobson
The Judge: John Astin
Milton Dammers: Jeffrey Combs
Patricia Ann Bradley: Dee Wallace-Stone
Johnny Charles Bartlett: Jake Busey
Cyrus: Chi McBride
Stuart, Bannister's Ghostly Assistant: Jim Fyfe
Sheriff Walt Perry: Troy Evans
Old Lady Bradley: Julianna McCarthy
Sgt. Hiles: R. Lee Ermey
Magda Rhys-Jones: Elizabeth Hawthorne
Debra Bannister: Angela Bloomfield
Harry Sinclair: Desmond Kelly
Steve Bayliss: Jonathan Blick

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for The Frighteners ]

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