Review of Heavenly Creatures (1994) by Carlos R — 14 Sep 2010

This film has little enough charm: it's overlong, character development is replaced by screaming and girning. The only reason people watch it is either because it's Peter Jackson's first actual film or because it has lesbians as the central characters in the film. I find it pretty ironic that Jackson has no problem depicting the murder of a woman with blood shown, but years later will become some wannabe WWE official censoring everything.

Rather than offering us a pared-down, chilling depiction of a shared and gathering madness, Jackson instead elects to smother the screen in a hideously garish CGI 'fantasy world', destroying completely the play's genuinely creepy 'just two people on a stage' effect. What's more, it was this movie which first showed that while he could do splatter-comedy, Jackson had real problems (which he still has) with engaging our emotions in a serious, dramatic production. None of the characters ring true; the adults are oddly cartoonish and the girls are merely talkative and almost distant. Peter Jackson just can't make us care about the characters, and that's possibly because he doesn't. 'Heavenly Creatures' is flat, dull and pedestrian; a botched adaption of good material and a tragic waste.

I felt shut out of this film like the parents did with their children. Peter Jackson is better off making "movies for the masses" which means he better just stick to anything remotely close to LOTR and leave meaningful shit to people who can handle them.