Overall rating (1-10) = 8
Scare factor (1-10) = 9+
Number of characters you sometimes just want to slap >1
First of all, comments seen here and elsewhere note that most of this movie's many scary moments are thoroughly preannounced, by swelling music and such. This is correct. Only a very few of the main fright points are done in "Jaws" style, i.e., sprung upon us when we can't help but be off-guard. Still, in my view, this doesn't detract much. This a VERY scary movie and a good investment if you like shock and surprise. I definitely *wouldn't* advise seeing it while holding a hot coffee or a fragile dessert.
That's not to say there's nothing in this film that detracts. First, what talent Michelle Pfeiffer has is largely wasted during the first hour on a script that's way too full of boomer-angst cliches. A big piece of the film's first half -- showing her character's daughter leaving for college and mom's resulting slushy reaction -- could have been easily condensed or evaporated, trimming several minutes from the total 129. If this was there to demonstrate what a good friend of mine likes to call EMS (Excessive Mom Syndrome) and to help confirm the idea that ole mom is even more delicate than she looks, then I suppose it worked. But so did several other shorter & simpler scenes, which sufficed. (At one point I heard a Valley-Girl sort of voice in the row behind me mutter, after a heavy sigh: "Okaaaaay, so she's wound a little too tight, we've *got* that already...." It was an accurate point. Somebody please wake me when this stock character type -- the artsy, wispy, idle, tormented, 40-ish upper-middle-class housewife with white teeth and a whiter Volvo -- breathes its last.
Some comments have also noted considerable over- and under-acting by both Ford and Pfeiffer. I agree. The mix of super-calm moments and shocker scenes, while effective, is jarringly uneven. I don't mean to imply that a horror/thriller film should always jolt us only at neat and regularly spaced intervals; but one could almost wonder if this film was divided into several parts at the beginning, each then being assigned to a separate director who rarely spoke with his or her collaborators. That said, I can't fault the *intensity* of any of the several pee-in-your-pants moments. As predictable and hollow as many of them are, each is a definite seat-grabber, and it would be hard to "spoil" any of them, even with a detailed verbal description.
The often-noted similarities to "Rear Window" are obvious, even too obvious, but *not* essential to the plot and in retrospect may seem gratuitous. Again, while the film may keep your mind engrossed and your breathing shallow, the overkill factor is high. Some of the camera or editing work seems overdone in the same way -- sometimes almost playfully so, and to such an extent that I can't really say for sure if the performers are guiltier there than the director.
For example, at one point about halfway through, a progressively more unnerved Claire [Pfeiffer] is inside her home peering intently at her neighbor's house, which we see in the predictable breathless pan from window to window, supposedly through her binoculars. When she finally sights Thorwald -- ooooooooops, I mean her neighbor Warren Feur -- we of *course* see his scowling face in a lightning-zoomed close-up with a loud blast of eerie music. and while this isn't done quite as badly as, say, the Large Marge eyeball-popper scene in "Pee-wee Herman's Big Adventure," it's in the same class when it comes to timing & soundtrack! It's quite a scary moment, but you might easily feel cheated by it soon afterward because (1) you realize that the zoom is a major part of what made the shot so scary, and (2) this Feur guy isn't really involved in the plot except to affirm, yet again, that Claire's a borderline basket case.
Miscellany: The film is set in Vermont, where I once lived, and I was pleased with some of the accuracies while also struck by some inaccuracies or improbabilities. None are really worth mentioning, except for the repeated mentions of the town of Adamant. Adamant is a real place in Vermont, but it's referred to at least twice in the script as being "down seven," meaning south on U.S. Highway 7 -- a main north-south thoroughfare, running the length of Vermont's western edge and traversing the Burlington/Lake Champlain area where the film's characters obviously live. But Adamant lies some 40 miles EAST of Route 7, a little over halfway across the state. It can't realistically be described as "down seven" from anywhere else in in Vermont or even Quebec, and in fact does not lie astride *any* numbered highway. (If the multiple mentions of this town's name are a new kind of "product placement" technique, I'd be interested to know the rationale for so thoroughly mislocating it!)
What happens *in* Adamant does have some bearing on the plot, but the town itself is not significant, or at least not significant enough to justify its quirky repetition. (If I missed something about this while making a quick visit to the john, someone please clue me in.)
Special effects: Not many, but those that we do see are quite good. No extraordinary innovations, just good scream-fuel.
Bottom line: It's scary and worth checking out. It's lame in spots and the story isn't all that new, but these things won't likely make you sad you went.
Scare factor (1-10) = 9+
Number of characters you sometimes just want to slap >1
First of all, comments seen here and elsewhere note that most of this movie's many scary moments are thoroughly preannounced, by swelling music and such. This is correct. Only a very few of the main fright points are done in "Jaws" style, i.e., sprung upon us when we can't help but be off-guard. Still, in my view, this doesn't detract much. This a VERY scary movie and a good investment if you like shock and surprise. I definitely *wouldn't* advise seeing it while holding a hot coffee or a fragile dessert.
That's not to say there's nothing in this film that detracts. First, what talent Michelle Pfeiffer has is largely wasted during the first hour on a script that's way too full of boomer-angst cliches. A big piece of the film's first half -- showing her character's daughter leaving for college and mom's resulting slushy reaction -- could have been easily condensed or evaporated, trimming several minutes from the total 129. If this was there to demonstrate what a good friend of mine likes to call EMS (Excessive Mom Syndrome) and to help confirm the idea that ole mom is even more delicate than she looks, then I suppose it worked. But so did several other shorter & simpler scenes, which sufficed. (At one point I heard a Valley-Girl sort of voice in the row behind me mutter, after a heavy sigh: "Okaaaaay, so she's wound a little too tight, we've *got* that already...." It was an accurate point. Somebody please wake me when this stock character type -- the artsy, wispy, idle, tormented, 40-ish upper-middle-class housewife with white teeth and a whiter Volvo -- breathes its last.
Some comments have also noted considerable over- and under-acting by both Ford and Pfeiffer. I agree. The mix of super-calm moments and shocker scenes, while effective, is jarringly uneven. I don't mean to imply that a horror/thriller film should always jolt us only at neat and regularly spaced intervals; but one could almost wonder if this film was divided into several parts at the beginning, each then being assigned to a separate director who rarely spoke with his or her collaborators. That said, I can't fault the *intensity* of any of the several pee-in-your-pants moments. As predictable and hollow as many of them are, each is a definite seat-grabber, and it would be hard to "spoil" any of them, even with a detailed verbal description.
The often-noted similarities to "Rear Window" are obvious, even too obvious, but *not* essential to the plot and in retrospect may seem gratuitous. Again, while the film may keep your mind engrossed and your breathing shallow, the overkill factor is high. Some of the camera or editing work seems overdone in the same way -- sometimes almost playfully so, and to such an extent that I can't really say for sure if the performers are guiltier there than the director.
For example, at one point about halfway through, a progressively more unnerved Claire [Pfeiffer] is inside her home peering intently at her neighbor's house, which we see in the predictable breathless pan from window to window, supposedly through her binoculars. When she finally sights Thorwald -- ooooooooops, I mean her neighbor Warren Feur -- we of *course* see his scowling face in a lightning-zoomed close-up with a loud blast of eerie music. and while this isn't done quite as badly as, say, the Large Marge eyeball-popper scene in "Pee-wee Herman's Big Adventure," it's in the same class when it comes to timing & soundtrack! It's quite a scary moment, but you might easily feel cheated by it soon afterward because (1) you realize that the zoom is a major part of what made the shot so scary, and (2) this Feur guy isn't really involved in the plot except to affirm, yet again, that Claire's a borderline basket case.
Miscellany: The film is set in Vermont, where I once lived, and I was pleased with some of the accuracies while also struck by some inaccuracies or improbabilities. None are really worth mentioning, except for the repeated mentions of the town of Adamant. Adamant is a real place in Vermont, but it's referred to at least twice in the script as being "down seven," meaning south on U.S. Highway 7 -- a main north-south thoroughfare, running the length of Vermont's western edge and traversing the Burlington/Lake Champlain area where the film's characters obviously live. But Adamant lies some 40 miles EAST of Route 7, a little over halfway across the state. It can't realistically be described as "down seven" from anywhere else in in Vermont or even Quebec, and in fact does not lie astride *any* numbered highway. (If the multiple mentions of this town's name are a new kind of "product placement" technique, I'd be interested to know the rationale for so thoroughly mislocating it!)
What happens *in* Adamant does have some bearing on the plot, but the town itself is not significant, or at least not significant enough to justify its quirky repetition. (If I missed something about this while making a quick visit to the john, someone please clue me in.)
Special effects: Not many, but those that we do see are quite good. No extraordinary innovations, just good scream-fuel.
Bottom line: It's scary and worth checking out. It's lame in spots and the story isn't all that new, but these things won't likely make you sad you went.