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One of the few unappreciated titles that the now-famous director Peter Jackson did in his career before it was made with the Lord of the Rings, was The Frighteners. I won't lie, the film is pretty poor and tries to pull off a strange psychopathic version of Ghostbusters, but at the same time there are too many good qualities that shouldn't go unnoticed. Like Jeffrey Combs doing an incredible job, as usual, of portraying a villainous lunatic.
The story starts in dreary town where Frank Bannister, a ghost-catching con artist, makes his living by staging hauntings with his ghost friends. He has three ghastly friends who aid him in is fake exorcisms and thus, his living is made. A simple comedic introduction that turns into a blood bath of psychopaths, ghouls, and Biff!
Unfortunately, the film has such high hopes that it convinces itself that it can be more than a horror movie with heavy reliance on special effects, and ultimate becomes too dramatic for its own good and overflows too many plot twists to take it seriously. But lets not get as far ahead of ourselves as this movie did, Jackson learned a great deal about CGI through this movie, and without this Back to the Future: Biff's Revenge (fake title obviously, thank you) we wouldn't have what many critics consider the best film trilogy ever made.
