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Cold Creek ManorRating:
Release Date: 02 March, 2004 Retail Price: $14.99 OUR Price: $13.99 You SAVE: $1.00! Cast: Complete Cast (13 total) |
Cold Creek Manor Reviews
The Other Reviews are too Nice to this film
Waste of time, waste of money and it is a horrid movie. You would think with two stars they could at least have made a decent "Hollywood" film, instead of this "thing."
Mike Figgis Gets My Vote for all-time Worst Director
There is so little to recommend about "Cold Creek Manor" that saying anything positive is a real reach. I guess that the production design is pretty good-it is a creepy old Canadian house. The movie has some entertainment value but only in the category of the unintentionally hilarious. It is hard to stop laughing during the snake scene as the family of four does a great imitation of the Three Stooges; whooping, screaming, and spinning around. Dennis Quaid is especially girly, the only way to make it funnier would have been if Quaid had been wearing one of his daughter's dresses. The clueless director fails to keep the four actors (playing family members) in character, as Kristen Stewart (the daughter) underplays and Quaid overplays-extremely. It looks like the daughter has switched personalities with her father. This is an extremely funny scene.
"Cold Creek Manor" is best described as a cross between "Cecil B. Demented" (Stephen Dorff reprises the title role)and "Scary Movie 3" minus all the intentional satire and humor. Because nothing ambitious is attempted, it does not even have the instructional value of most bad movies.
Mike Figgis is arguably the most clueless director in history and "Cold Creek Manor" is a splendid fusion of all his directorial deficiencies. His physical casting is poor, he draws "worst ever" performances from almost everyone in the ensemble, and he ignores opportunities to lay misdirection and suspense.
The rules of the psychological thriller genre are basic because they are so effective, they go back to the earliest days of the cinema. Even student films get a lot of mileage out of playing with these conventions because audiences already understand the language of this type of film. If you are not going to do a twist at the end (not having a twist is in and of itself a twist) you at least have to keep the audience off balance during the body of the film. "Cold Creek Manor" is predictable from its first frame to its last, it never deviates from the obvious. There are opportunities to play with the audience throughout the movie and Figgis drops the ball each time.
Even little scenes can provide big thrills if correctly structured. Take the scene where Dorff's character kills his father. There are two possible ways for a competent director to play that scene. They could set it up so that the audience is lulled into thinking nothing will happen and is then stunned when the violence comes out of nowhere. Or it could be set up where everything (actions, score, motivation) telegraphs that a murder is about to happen, only to have it not occur. In this particular case Figgis built up the expectation that son was about to kill his father so that when he actually did so there was no surprise, no shock, no thrill.
Near the end you conclude that the Stephen Dorff character is insanely stupid. You have reached the insanity diagnosis well before he actually declares his mental condition on the screen. You reach it because you have just seen him push Sharon Stone into a deep well and inexplicably permit her husband to fish her out. You have watched as the two of them hike out of the woods and through the fields to their house (Cold Creek Manor). You have watched as immediately upon their arrival Dorff breaks in and chases them onto the roof, where he announces that he intends to kill them and push them down the well (same well they just left way out in the woods; duh!).
Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.
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