Review of Cold Creek Manor (2003) by Steven E — 29 Mar 2004

In an interview highlighted as a bonus feature on the DVD, Cold Creek Manor director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas, Time Code) explains the rules of the thriller genre? and the importance of knowing that there is a point where the audience ?gets it? and wants the story to move forward quickly. Unfortunately, Figgis forgot his own advice and has constructed a film that is unnecessarily long and moves so slowly through the first hour and a half that one begins to think watching grass grow may have been a more constructive use of the time.

The premise is interesting enough and had the potential for creating some real tension. Yuppie family decides to leave the big city and move into dream home in the country. All is well until scary dude arrives, fresh out of prison, to reclaim his house and keep its secrets from being discovered. From there the plot is painfully predictable and Figgis bores us with scene after scene designed to establish the fragile mental state of the antagonist, a point that is abundantly clear to the audience from the moment he arrives on-screen. Watching Dennis Quaid and Stephen Dorff dance around each other for 90 minutes is a lot like watching a school yard fight in which the participants circle around one another trading insults but never throwing any punches. It eventually becomes tiresome to watch and you just want them to kick the crap out of each other and get it over with.

Dorff (Blade, Deuces Wild) delivers the only performance that stands out as the stranger with the troubled past. He walks a fine line between charming and menacing, and there are a couple of instances where I actually felt empathy for his character ? until I remembered he was a few fries short of a Happy Meal. The rest of the cast is simply adequate. Quaid (The Rookie, Far From Heaven) does a fine job spending most of the film looking gravely worried and Sharon Stone (Basic Instinct, Casino) proves she has the pipes to rival any reigning scream queen. Juliette Lewis (Natural Born Killers, Starsky & Hutch) makes an appearance as yet another desperate loser clinging to Dorff?s character despite his penchant for using her as a punching bag.

DVD extras include commentary by Figgis, an uninteresting short feature detailing how the documentary footage shot by Quaid?s character was done, far too few deleted scenes, and an alternate ending that is unbelievably insulting to the intelligence of the viewer.

Overall, Cold Creek Manor is excruciatingly slow, wholly predictable, and should have been condemned for failing to be up to code.