Peter Jackson

So, Peter Jackson. Here is the first line of the Wikipedia entry for his second movie, Meet The Feebles:

“Meet the Feebles (also known as Frogs of War in New Zealand as the film's English fake working title) is a 1989 New Zealand adult puppet musical black comedy film directed by Peter Jackson…”

Adult. Puppet. Musical. Black comedy. Here is the last line of the first paragraph of his personal entry:

“He is the fifth-highest-grossing film director of all-time, with his films having made over $6.5 billion worldwide.”

How did we get from there to here? It almost boggles the mind that such a journey could even be conceived of, let alone attempted or made. You could say it about Matt Parker and Trey Stone, who do have an adult puppet musical comedy action movie on their CV in Team America: World Police, but they have never seemed to want mainstream glory. Where did it all go right for Peter Jackson?

Way back in the early 1990s, as a nerd, I was aware of Peter Jackson’s early work. You’d go to comic book or movie shops and you’d see his early movies on video sat in the corner. His debut, 1987’s Bad Taste, which sees aliens attempt to sell humans off as fast food. Meet The Feebles, his 1989 puppet movie, which seems like an ultra-crude version of the Muppets. And then his love letter to over-the top, mega-gory zombie movies, Brain Dead/Dead Alive, which is as stupid and fun as such a movie can be. Peter Jackson, king of low-budget New Zealand indie splatter comedy nonsense.

Somehow, Jackson was able to leverage the success of Braindead into securing enough funding to produce a movie about a dark moment in New Zealand’s otherwise quiet suburban history: the Parker-Hulme Murder. Two teenage girls find their relationship spiralling into unhealthy obsession and when their parents try to keep them apart, the girls murder Parker’s mother. Jackson’s approach was not to focus on the murder aspect of the story. He and his partner, Fran Walsh, decided to examine how the friendship led to the disaster. Heavenly Creatures, the resulting movie, is really very good. So good, it was Oscar-nominated for best screenplay. So good, it made Jackson and Walsh film-makers to keep an eye on. Oh, and it essentially made a star out of Kate Winslet. Jackson showed that with the right cast and screenplay, he could make a thoughtful movie which coaxed convincing performances out of two teenage girls. You wouldn’t have thought he had it in him, but you’d have been wrong.

I won’t say much about the Lord of the Rings movies. I loved Fellowship, was entertained by Two Towers, and found Return of the King to be bloated and slow, but with great moments. Somehow, this splattercore film-maker from New Zealand showed Hollywood just what could be done with the right screenplay, the right vision, the right cast, and enough faith in the process to see it through. Jackson’s style is on full show: great swooping shots, Dutch angles to show disorientation, a real knack for working with actors of both great repute and none at all, and a nose for making special effects shine.

But he didn’t go straight from a small-scale, low-budget drama about crime in New Zealand to nine hours of hobbits and Nazgul. No, when Hollywood came calling for Jackson, it let him make a movie much closer to his gory past than his gaudy future.

The Frighteners came into being when Jackson and Walsh were working on Heavenly Creatures. They bashed together a treatment for the movie – a synopsis-like document which covers the main beats and scenes – and sent it off to their rep in Hollywood. From there, it got into the hands of Robert Zemeckis, who liked its potential. Over the years, he hired Jackson and Walsh to develop the treatment into a draft for inclusion in Tales from the Crypt, and then into a feature-length screenplay of its own. Zemeckis felt Jackson would be the better choice as director and persuaded Universal Pictures to fund it and release it.

The cast is not what anyone would call star-studded. Having Zemeckis as the producer at least meant Michael J Fox could be cast as the lead. The rest…well, it would be cruel to call them no-names. We have Jeffrey Combs, he of Reanimator and DS9 fame; Trinny Alvarado (?) as the female lead; Elliot’s mum from ET, Dee Wallace Stone; a young Jake Busey; R Lee Ermey for some shouty angry military man work. Apparently, Jackson wanted a cast of unknowns. Yup. Money saved on actors is money he could spend on special effects. And he shot it in New Zealand, which, when appropriately wet and filled with American cars, passes for Oregon.

In The Frighteners, the story begins in 1964 when spree killer Johnny Bartlett (Busey) is executed for killing twelve people at the sanatorium of Fairwater. His girlfriend, Patricia, is sent to prison for helping him. Many years later, in 1995, she is released into the care of her mother, but a spooky ghost haunts and attacks them. A recently arrived doctor, Lucy (Alvarado) tries to help them, but Mother wants none of it.

Fairwater is being rocked by a series of unexplained deaths. Frank (Fox) is a psychic investigator and con-man who tries to drum up business at funerals. Lucy’s husband, Ray, is big mad at Frank for damaging his garden. But after a poltergeist disrupts their house, Lucy calls Frank to come and fix it. It turns out Frank is employing ghosts – which he has the power to see – to stage hauntings and con people out of their money. However, while ‘exorcising’ the poltergeist, Frank notices Ray has the number 37 carved onto his forehead in glowing letters.

Ray dies the next day. He runs into Frank and begs him for help communicating with Lucy. Frank agrees, and meets another man with a number on his head – 38 – who is attacked and killed by a monstrous ghost which looks like the grim reaper (or, hem hem, a Nazgul). Frank flees the scene and notices a light in the sky which leads him to a museum, where the evil spook is finishing off victim 39. Victim 40 is also present, and after Frank and his ghost friends fail to save her, she accuses Frank of being the killer of all these people and, in the past, his own wife – victim 13.

Frank feels responsible and surrenders to the police, where he is interrogated by oddball FBI agent Dammers (Combs). Dammers also believes Frank is responsible for all the unexplained deaths in Fairwater. Lucy later visits Frank in jail, where he sees she is victim 41. They escape the Reaper’s attack, although Frank’s ghost buddies are destroyed, and Frank persuades Lucy to give him a near-death experience, so Frank can defeat the Reaper. Frank discovers the Reaper is in fact the ghost of Bartlett, who wants nothing more than to become the greatest serial killer of all time.

After Lucy revives Frank, they go to warn Patricia that Barlett is back and out for blood. But at Patricia’s home, they discover her murdered mother and an urn, which they use to trap Bartlett. They escape the murderous Patricia and head off to the sanatorium, which has a chapel they can use to exorcise Bartlett’s ghost. While adventuring through the building, fending off both Patricia and Dammers, Frank has visions which implicate Patricia in the massacre.

Dammers unwittingly releases Bartlett’s ghost from the urn before Patricia shoots his head off, and then Patricia strangles Frank to death, but Frank drags the kill-crazy pair into the light beam to heaven, which for them turns into a one-way trip to hell. Up in heaven, Frank meets his ghost buddies who are whole and happy, and his deceased wife, who send him back to Earth to live a complete, joyous life.

Overall, The Frighteners is a fun movie. It is dark and violent, not a film for younger kids at all, despite Jackson’s best efforts to avoid an R-rating. It isn’t bloody, certainly not by the standards of Braindead, a film dripping in gore. The Frighteners doesn’t shy away from showing ghosts at various levels of decay, or being torn apart in quite graphic ways, or being excessively horny around Egyptian mummies at a museum. Jackson certainly isn’t shy about showing us violence, in the same way he never has been.

Most of that violence is cartoonish and happens to ghosts, which places an insane demand on the special effects. Should you ever watch this movie, bear in mind the special effects date back to the best that 1995 had to offer, and were the first digital special effects created by Weta. By modern standards, they now look cheap and janky as all hell, but the effort and love expended bringing the ghosts to life means many of the effects still work. Frank’s ghost friends, and the indignities inflicted upon them, do still look convincing. The Reaper effects are not so hot. Most of the time, the Reaper exists as a shape moving beneath and disrupting surfaces like wallpaper, carpets and the like, and…it was impressive in 1996. In 2025, it doesn’t convince. But all the effects work is at least fun and full of intent and energy.

The film benefits and feeds off this energy. It takes its time to get going – the first half of the film, before the Reaper puts in a full appearance at the museum, is mostly a long series of gags featuring Frank and all the ghosts he can see. Jackson is clearly leaning on the comedy side of his career. And while most of these sequences are diverting as a minimum, there is only so much low-brow ectoplasm humour and Frank’s mopey introspection an audience can sit through before it starts to drag.

Once the midpoint is reached, hoo boy are we off to the races. Dammers doesn’t appear before the museum sequence, but when he’s on screen, the film’s energy is immediately lifted. Jackson and Walsh wrote the character to be a bizarre mix of inner torment and outer madness and Combs plays the part with relish, gusto and abandon. He’s great in the role, and I suspect only Jim Carrey could play the part in a similar vein and get away with it. Combs is wild and hammy and alongside a quite charming turn from Fox and decent work from Alvarado, the cast have fun with the material.

The last fifty minutes of this film are massive fun. Once Frank escapes from jail, the brakes are let off and the action ramps up and tumbles manically towards the climax. If I was left unimpressed by the opening, the second half of the movie left me completely satisfied. Jackson and Walsh have usually shown a sure hand with screenplays, and while the storytelling in The Frighteners is utterly conventional in structure, it is also utterly competent. Frank has a clear arc to his character, the villains are well-drawn and wicked, Dammers is weird and creepy and fun…yeah, this film is a good time, all in all.

But we live in a world where The Frighteners is the least well-known of Jackson’s major movies. More people saw his adaptation of The Lovely Bones than this. It failed at the box office, and this may be due to Universal not knowing how to promote the movie. The poster is, uh, not impressive. The trailer doesn’t actually seem to know what the movie is actually about, probably to avoid spoiling the story. And then Universal released it to run against Independence Day instead of in its intended Halloween slot. Yeah. Figure that one out.

Ok, so The Frighteners isn’t a top-tier movie. For a horror, it’s not especially scary. For a comedy, it isn’t funny enough. But it is fun and it is entertaining, and it’s much much better than those interminable bloody Hobbit movies. This one is worth checking out.