Directed by David Koepp
Starring Kevin Bacon, Kathryn Erbe, Zachary David Cope, Illeana Douglas and Jennifer Morrison
The movie in question today is another one that, for whatever reason, escaped my radar until just now. Count me in among the many, many people back in 1999 who were more enthralled by The Sixth Sense, directed by that guy that I once called the best director currently working. Which was then immediately followed by his career dovetail into unimaginable shit...but I digress.
Yup, Stir of Echoes came out September of 1999, somewhat of a hit with critics but more or less vanishing from multiplexes within a month. Looking back, I can see why. The flick has its moments, but that's all they are. The script (by David Koepp of all people, who also directed) takes a novel from 1958 and does its damndest to modernize it. While the material is there for some really awesome true-life horror stuff, it more often than not takes the easy route of flashy MTV-style editing and camera tricks. Isn't it amazing to remember a time when stuff like this was only occasionally noticed instead of the norm? Pepperidge Farm remembers. Another thing I remember is watching the final 45 minutes or so on HBO back in the day, finding the movie forgettable and really cookie-cutter. Now, I think it's definitely more than that, but not in the way that I can really recommend. More on that later.
Folks, I read something disheartening when I was doing the Tremors franchise review. Apparently, Kevin Bacon considers Tremors the low-point of his acting career, even crying to his wife during filming that he couldn't believe he was doing a movie about giant underground worms. I can't say that I know what it's like to be a Hollywood actor, but I would MUCH rather be in an underground worm movie than a semi-generic ghost flick. Chalk that up to the symptoms of my one-of-a-kind glandular condition. Alas, concerned family man Bacon is what we get here, and truth be told, he does a fantastic job in this movie. The character is Tom Witzky, phone linesman and family man extraordinaire. His wife Maggie (Kathryn Erbe) is pregnant with their second child, and his existing (?) son Jake (Zachary David Cope) is one of those stereotypical horror movie creepy kids that I've harped about on here before.
Without bothering to look up any of the handy-dandy IMDB external reviews, I'm guessing that there were more than a few mentions by critics back then about how there was another movie released shortly before this one that also featured a kid who sees dead people. Since this story was concocted in the late '50s, I'm guessing that this flick holds the trump card in the "who ripped off who?" category. Amazingly, this plot convention isn't mentioned very much, because what REALLY sets the plot in motion is Jake's abrasive sister-in-law Lisa (Illeana Douglas, who kind of looks like Toni Collette). A party-time pissing contest turns into Lisa hypnotizing Jake, which results in what's actually a pretty cool scene involving an empty theater and a white screen that I remembered well enough to write about just now.
From this point forward, Tom starts seeing weird visions of a dead teenager on his couch (don't ask), which prompts the mystery plot to move forward. It turns out that this girl disappeared from the neighborhood six months prior, and Tom is obsessed with finding out what happened to her. How obsessed? Well, enough to never go to work again and seemingly never let the couch out of his vision. Perfectly rational behavior, if I say so myself. In this reporter's opinion, this is where the movie starts to wrong from a very sound setup, because it's all stuff we've seen before. There IS the added wrinkle of the close-knit working class neighborhood that Tom calls home, complete with a best friend played by Kevin Dunn (no, not Kevin "Most Hated Man in the Internet Wrestling Community" Dunn, but rather the guy who played Jerry Seinfeld's dickhead childhood friend who didn't like turkey roll) who seems to care a whole lot about his football hero son. Foreshadowing alert.
I'll give it to the movie for its opening half. The setup was certainly there for some fantastically sick, creepy stuff to go on as Tom's visions of the past become more and more frequent. Instead, it went the decidedly opposite route of The Sixth Sense. That flick was all about the quiet; this one throws a lot of loud shit at you. Sometimes it's effective, like the "less is more" faceoff that Tom has late in the movie after finding the dead body in the finale. Sometimes it isn't, like the flashback sequence that shows how said dead body became...uh, dead. While Bacon puts his heart and soul into the movie throughout the whole thing, he can't carry just how generic the whole thing becomes late in the game.
Another big plus that the movie has is its acting, even in the non-Bacon roles. Douglas is really good as the sister-in-law - she's sarcastic in a totally endearing way, and Dunn is always aces in anything he's in when he isn't purposefully trying to sabotage NXT call-ups. The atmosphere is also pretty well-done; a tight-knit Chicago neighborhood is something that you generally don't see in a horror/suspense movie these days. It's also got an interesting way to move the plot forward in the form of the couple hypnosis sessions that Tom undergoes; it's definitely more inventive than finding plot clues from goddamn library microfilm, for example. It's pretty much everything else in between that falls a little flat, mainly due to familiarity.
In short, everyone involved in this movie really tries, but it's material is something that's hard to make truly captivating with any amount of dressing up. For that, I'll give this flick ** 1/2 out of ****. It's worth a watch on Netflix, but don't track it down otherwise.
No comments:
Post a Comment