Cold Creek Manor (DVD)

Connect to Facebook/Twitter, recommend via email and much more.

---

To corrupt a line from "Mary Poppins," I always say there's nothing like a good haunted-house movie. But this is nothing like a good haunted-house movie.

Director Mike Figgis ("Leaving Las Vegas," "The Loss of Sexual Innocence," "Timecode") circumvents the problem by saying his 2003 production, "Cold Creek Manor," is a psychological thriller. Fair enough. If only it involved more psychology and more thrills that we couldn't see coming a mile away.

Living in the big city can be noisy, hurried, and dangerous under the best of conditions, but when Cooper and Leah Tilson's son is almost killed in a traffic accident, they decide to call it quits, take their two children, leave Manhattan, and head for the quiet life in rural, upper-state New York. As the wife says, "Big houses in the country cost a lot less than tiny houses in New York City." So they buy a big house in the country. A really big house. Cold Creek Manor is a huge, rambling old estate, and maybe they should have questioned why they got it so cheap. It comes with a history.

Although the story takes seemingly forever to unfold, when the clues are in place early on, we know exactly what to expect for the rest of the film. And our expectations are fulfilled one-hundred percent. This situation doesn't make for much tension, suspense, or surprise, so that, too, becomes an expectation fulfilled. When Dale Massie, the weird, obnoxious former owner of the place shows up, just released from prison, we know all we need to know about what's going to happen next.

You can see how there could have been an earnest movie thriller lurking in here somewhere, a thriller along the lines of "Cape Fear," but the cliché-laden script, racked by implausibilities at every turn, won't let it get out. The manor, for instance, is described as a sheep ranch until recently, at one point slaughtering over a thousand animals in a couple of days. Yet the house is completely surrounded by woods. Where did the sheep graze? The Tilsons pay a relatively small price for the estate, but it's so rundown it would cost ten times the amount they paid to fix it up. A plague of six or eight poisonous snakes suddenly infests the house, and it's clear that somebody planted them there. But how did somebody sneak into the house where four people were sleeping and put them all around in different locations without waking anyone? And why don't the Tilsons call the police and ask for an investigation afterwards? And where would anybody get a half a dozen or more poisonous snakes in a small town? Did the culprit mail-order them, or did he drive to a distant snake emporium for the occasion? I mean, you don't just call up your local pet shop and ask to buy six or eight venomous snakes. When a viewer is constantly asking these kinds of questions while the movie is going on, it detracts from any suspension of disbelief along the way.

The characters are no better off than the script, either, as they are almost entirely one-dimensional. Dennis Quaid plays Cooper Tilson, a low-budget documentary filmmaker who decides to make a movie about the old house and its former occupants. But the documentary angle goes nowhere, except to tell us what we already know--that the house had some odd former owners. Quaid plays the part square jawed and grim faced at best. Which is more than can be said for Sharon Stone as Leah Tilson. She practically disappears, her character is so bland. The only two actors who fare at all well are Stephen Dorff as the creepy Dale Massie because he gets to take his shirt off and prove how well he took care of himself in prison, and Juliette Lewis as Ruby, the town trailer slut, because she's the only colorful character in the story and puts her teeth into the stereotype with relish. Christopher Plummer, of all people, is wasted in a bit part as old man Massie, Dale's father, lying in a hospital bed and being grumpy.