Movie Reviews from
By John Ruch
© 1996 CM Media, Inc.
Fear (1996)
So you want
to know about “Fear,” do you? Try sitting in a theater at
That’s not the scary part. The scary part was realizing I’d forgotten to bring a notebook. Had to scrawl notes about the movie in the margins of the instruction booklet. Somehow, it felt perfectly natural to write “eye for an eye—tooth for a fuckin’ tooth” on an IRS document.
Alas, it was the last workout my adrenal glands got from this impotent thriller-cum-music video. It’s the work of James Foley of “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “At Close Range” fame.
Earlier this year, Foley teamed with the writer of “Psycho” to make “Two Bits,” a family tale that wanted to be sweet but, predictably, only worked when it was creepy (specifically, a suicide witnessed by children).
While “Fear” is a thriller, it’s still family-themed and teenager-targeted, what with its story of a 16-year-old girl (Reese Witherspoon) stalked by a maniacal boyfriend (Mark Wahlberg, formerly Marky Mark). This time, Foley teamed with the writer of “The Mean Season” and got the same predictably gross results.
At first, Witherspoon likes Wahlberg, which is transmitted via very explicit scenes of back-alley kissing and mutual masturbation on amusement park rides.
Of course,
Foley uses even less restraint when Wahlberg reveals
his insanity and, with a horde of his punk friends (their motto: the “eye for
an eye” quote above) lay “Night of the Living Dead”-style siege to the
Witherspoon home. Hands are gored with drills, dogs are beheaded—it’s a grunge
“Friday the 13th,” even set in
Nothing to it is new, not even the Bush songs. When we meet the family dog, we know it’ll be mincemeat before the credits roll. Ditto for Witherspoon’s platonic boy pal at school (especially since he habitually walks home through a deserted forest).
The
hilarious cast, at least, is primo B-movie material. William Peterson, the Jordache-clad hotshot of “To Live and Die in
“The guy gives me the creeps!”
“The guy is a psychopath!”
“OK, my little sugarpie?”
Still, he’s upstaged by Wahlberg, who beats his own chest ape-style to fake injury, tattoos himself with Bic ink, and goes to the big rap show in the sky after being stabbed with a peace pipe.
Former “Who’s the Boss” good girl Alyssa Milano builds her Jayne Mansfield-rivaling-résumé (already featuring “Double Dragon” and “Commando”) with a role as Witherspoon’s junkie slut girlfriend.
The laughs
they provide still aren’t enough to save a film that’s about as creative as its
title. You’ve seen it all done before (and probably more tastefully)—it’s just
too taxing to sit through it again.