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"The Frighteners" toys with its terrors

By LAURA MILLER One of the few things that Aristotle was absolutely right about is the incompatibility of comedy and tragedy. If he'd been around for the 1980s Golden Age of horror movies, he might have observed the same for comedy and terror. You can make 'em laugh, and heartily, but don't expect to give them a serious case of the creeps (or, for that matter, turn them on, but that's another story) at the same time. The movies of Peter Jackson prove a case in point. The director of the 1994 art-house hit "Heavenly Creatures," Jackson is also the creator of what he calls "splatstick" features, including his most recent effort, "The Frighteners," made (like all his work) in his native New Zealand. "Heavenly Creatures," based on the true story of a pair of teenager girls who murder one of their mothers, is by far the scarier of the two -- despite the fact that "The Frighteners" boasts a serial killer, a haunted house, a black-cloaked monster who reaches into people's chests and squeezes their hearts, a maniacally sinister old lady and at least a dozen ghosts. Jackson himself recalls the '80s horror boom with obvious fondness. He has cast Jeffrey Combs, star of Stuart Gordon's formidably twisted 1985 gorefest "Re-Animator," as a twitchy FBI agent, and named one of his minor characters Bryce Campbell, a tip o' the hat to the legendary lead from Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead" trilogy, Bruce Campbell. But the movies he uses as touchstones mark the end of that era -- the point where the clever boys who used the genre's reliable commercialism to jump-start their careers started winking at the audience. With them, the dark fruit of '80s horror turned overripe, and filmmakers switched from scaring audiences to inviting us to smirk knowingly at the extremity of their gruesome and sadistic special effects. "The Frighteners" belongs to a more commonplace variety of horror-comedy, one that relies on schtick rather than satire. It echoes some of Raimi's rollercoaster camera work and a touch of Gordon's black humor, but it's essentially a toothless romp, without the Grand Guignol virtuosity to please the hardcore fan base and too goofy to frighten anyone. All truly scary movies -- "Psycho," "The Haunting," "Night of the Living Dead," "The Brood" and the first "Nightmare on Elm Street" -- are, despite the occasional joke, deadly serious at heart. Effective horror (like effective smut) requires an immediate, visceral identification with the business at hand, while comedy takes us a step backward to detachment. So horror-comedies usually don't work as either. "The Frighteners," however, has its moments, and all of its successes are comic. Michael J. Fox, as Fred Barnes, a "psychic investigator" who exploits his genuine ability to communicate with spirits to work an "exorcism" hustle, is ideally cast as a smoothie gone to seed. A former pony-tailed, Italian-suited architect, he's now shorn and shabby, stowing his ghost accomplices in the trunk of a rattle-trap Volvo and sneaking into funerals to hand out business cards. Combs sends up "X-Files" paranoia as a G-man veteran of too many paranormal and cult investigations -- he's so jumpy he questions witnesses while ducking behind door jambs and goes to pieces every time a woman raises her voice. The special effects are pleasantly adept but uninspired. Jackson's artful, low-key introduction of fantasy elements into the character-based drama of "Heavenly Creatures" gave that film an unsettling charge. By contrast, the hints of real character he proffers in "The Frighteners" just seem wasted. Will this, the far more conventional film, actually make more money? Perhaps. And since Jackson is patently capable of riskier, more interesting movie-making, the only frightful thing about "The Frighteners" is the intimation that he may never get around to it.

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