Cold Creek Manor (2003)
Review by HTQ4
Film:
DVD:

Written by Richard Jeffries
Directed by Mike Figgis
Starring Dennis Quaid, Sharon Stone, Stephen Dorff, Juliette Lewis, Kristen Stewart, Ryan Wilson, Dana Ekelson, and Christopher Plummer

Features:

• Running audio commentary by director Figgis
  
• Deleted Scenes including bonus alternate ending
  
• "Rules of the Game" Featurette
  
• "Cooper's Documentary" Featurette
  

My Advice: Avoid it.

After a nearly fatal accident, Cooper Tilson (Quaid) decides to move his family out of the Big Apple and into the rural areas of upstate New York. However, the house that they have fallen in love with has a little bit of a history. It seems that the man who was supposed to inherit it (Dorff) has spent the last several years in jail. Now that he's out of jail, he's come back to the house and offers to help the Tilsons out as the handyman on the property. What they don't know is that he wants to take the house back for his own because it hides a deadly secret about his past.

What a waste of a movie. Given the cast--well, at least Quaid--this movie should have done much better at the box office and...well...been a much better movie in general. The script was so weak that it couldn't help but fail. First of all, the script is nothing but a series of movie cliches that have played themselves out long ago. The character that Dorff created is neither threatening nor scary enough to create the dramatic tension needed to really keep this movie from getting bogged down in boredom.

Also, this type of movie can easily fall into a very large and obvious trap: if the principal characters are that scared for their lives, why don't they either get out or call the police? It seems to me the trick to these movies is to create a viable reason as to why neither of those options are available. This movie provides no such alibi. Instead, you spend the entire movie telling Quaid's character to either call the police or get the hell out. And there's no real climax because everything is so predictable. Also, Stone was the wrong casting choice for this movie. She either didn't care enough about the project to give it her all, or she gave it her all, and it just wasn't enough. There is one scene where they confront each other about their lives in the big city; Quaid is just giving her a ton of stuff to work with and she just overacts in return. It's just a shame.

The DVD is actually better than this movie deserves. First of all, there is a commentary track by Figgis. The best reason to listen to this commentary is to hear him defend his movie. There are no surprising revelations that come out of it--I guess we should be thankful that the guys who put this DVD together didn't just skip it altogether, right?

There is a featurette about the fact that Quaid's character is a low-budget documentary filmmaker who decides to research his new house. This documentary is about the documentary they shot to make it work within the story. What a boring docu--in that way, I guess it compliments the film well. It's funny to hear Stone try to talk about the fascinating stuff that Figgis did to make these documentaries and home videos for the movie. She tries so desperately to make it sound like it's groundbreaking stuff. The only really cool thing is that Figgis (and/or his crew) devised this "steering wheel" for the handheld camera that allowed him to keep it from being so jumpy. Other than that, there's not much to this DVD.

The other documentary is about the "rules" of making a film of this genre. This was a bad idea to include, since all it does is give evidence of every single rule that they broke during the course of the film.

The intro to the deleted scenes is Figgis talking the fact that, in making a thriller, you have to shoot too much film in order to be able to edit it down right to create the correct amount of tension. This is a weird collection of deleted scenes. First of all, the commentary tracks are not played while you watch the scene, they are more like introductions. However, on the disc that I watched, the introductions had nothing to do with the scenes that I was about to see. Very odd. And if the movie put you to sleep, wait until you see the alternate ending. If they had kept this ending in the movie, people would have been bleeding from the eyeballs to get out of the theatre.

Since all you get with this one is a bad movie with some mediocre special features, I'm going to suggest that you avoid this thing at all costs.