The depressing thing about paranormal thrillers is how damned normal most of them are. After all, there's nothing particularly supernatural about cliches. In Hideaway (TriStar, R), Jeff Goldblum plays a devoted husband-daddy, Hatch Harrison, who dies -- for a few hours, at least -- following a freak auto accident and is brought back to life in the hospital. During his brush with the abyss, he is sucked into some sort of cosmic vortex (you know, computer-generated light tunnels and pulsating devil's heads), and it's there that his soul is joined to that of a psycho teen killer who specializes in stalking pretty young girls just like Hatch's own daughter, Regina (Alicia Silverstone). Hatch begins to experience dream visions in which he sees through the demon's eyes; it's as if he were committing the murders himself. But are they merely hallucinations? Actually, the question doesn't amount to much, since Hideaway seems to be the story of a man whose brain has become a VCR that plays bad B horror movies.
The film lifts its metaphysical pretensions from The Shining and Don't Look Now, but unlike those pictures, which rooted their thrills in a tremulous atmosphere of domestic unease, Hideaway is essentially a slasher thriller tricked up with virtual-reality head trips. (They're the best thing in the movie, too -- they're virtually entertaining.) The film doesn't make enough of the Freudian kink at its core: that Hatch would entertain fantasies of murdering his own daughter as a way of warding off his latent attraction to her. Instead, we get such generic perversities as the teen killer (Jeremy Sisto) coming on to Regina at a nightclub. With his fashion-victim sunglasses and death-metal leer, this guy is about as scary as an Ozzy Osbourne T-shirt. Silverstone, the fetching ingenue from the Aerosmith videos, knows how to work her best feature, the upside-down teen-doll smirk that lends her angel face just the right hint of womanly concupiscence. Someone ought to cast her as Lolita, but fast. Her talent may not last much past the age of consent. C-
Add your comment
The rules: Keep it clean, and stay on the subject or we might delete your comment. If you see inappropriate language, e-mail us. An asterisk * indicates a required field.