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COLD CREEK MANOR Send This Review to a Friend
There's a lesson to be learned from "Cold Creek Manor." Don't leave Manhattan for the countryside. Dennis Quaid and Sharon Stone as Cooper and Leah Tilson do, getting a buy on a huge, decrepit mansion, renovating it and moving in with their children after their son is nearly run over on a city street. As such moves turn out in such movies, there's a nasty history to the house--no ghosts but worse. There's also Stephen Dorff as Dale Massie, the creepy ex-con son of the former owner, and Dale is not about to see a family move in what was once his home without hell to pay.
Given the genre, director Mike Figgis and screenwriter Richard Jefferies have done quite well, thanks in no small measure to having Quaid and Stone in the leads. Dorff is over the top, as he should be, and Juliette Lewis is sleazily sexy as Dale's girlfriend and the sister of the local sheriff, played in a low key but no-nonsense manner by Dana Eskelson. Christopoher Plummer, barely recognizable under a forest of face hair, plays Dale's angry, mean father languishing in a nursing home.
Figgis manages to build interest and suspense as the Tilsons get deeper into danger, starting with Cooper's decision to help Dale out by hiring him to put the pool in shape. Dale has a larger agenda. As is required in such horror-bent flicks, there must be a violent climax. All could have been avoided had the couple stayed in good old New York, New York without succumbing to the lure of moving to greenery. But then audiences who thrive on such films would have been deprived of seeing them do battle and discover the terrible secret of Cold Creek Manor. A Touchstone Pictures release.
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