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Director Peter Jackson's Hollywood debut finds ghostbuster/con-man Fox drumming up business in a small town which has been beset by a series of unexplained deaths. Fox has an advantage in his business since his employees are real ghosts who create bogus hauntings for Fox to clean out. His ectoplasmic helpers are not much proof against the supernatural forces arrayed against him, incarnated in the shape of what appears to be the grim reaper himself. Fox is fine in the lead, imbuing it with just the right mix of likeability and panic, as is Trini Alvarado (who doesn't get nearly as much work as she deserves) as one of his clients, but it is the secondary characters who really shine, particularly Jeffrey Combs as a demented FBI agent (Dale Cooper after a few too many blows to the head, one supposes) and Dee Wallace Stone, who pretty much rampages away with the movie toward the end. Mix liberally with seamless special effects and the overheated pacing one has come to expect from Peter Jackson and the result is an entertaining way to while away two hours.

All well and good. But being merely entertaining here constitutes a failure. This is a retreat for Jackson, whose other movies all have the effect on the audience (whether you like them or not) of making them leave the theater muttering "What the hell was that?!" This is the first of Jackson's movies which is not unique--you've seen stuff like it before, which is not the case with any of Jackson's other four features. In point of fact, The Frighteners plays a lot like Jackson is raiding himself. It resembles Dead Alive in a lot of specifics and he has imported some of the touches that make Heavenly Creatures so goddamn disturbing. Sometimes, the mix works. Other times it doesn't. And at times, Jackson seems completely out of control of it, particularly at the end, which reveals that he didn't have a particularly clear idea of where he was going in the first place.