By Elice Giorgione
Staff Writer
Recently my friend Leslie and I drove into Hollywood, navigated through an hour of brutal movie premiere traffic, paid $2 to park five stories underground, expertly evaded some very frightening characters on the sidewalk and then shelled out an entire 10 bucks each at the overpriced Mann Chinese 6 Theater. All this was to secure front row, very left-side-of-the-theater, neck-breaking seats in a showing of the highly anticipated (for us at least) “Cold Creek Manor.”
The first time I saw the previews for this movie, I knew I wanted to see it as soon as it came out. It just looked like a truly creepy and well-done movie – such a rare gem in the cheesy-horror-film genre of today. Since “The Others,” there really hasn’t been a quality scary movie that I have considered worth seeing in the theater. But from all appearances, “Cold Creek Manor” looked far too tempting to wait until video.
I downloaded the trailer from the Internet and watched my 15-inch laptop screen in fascination as eerie scenes flashed across it in a supernatural teaser of the film’s plot. My mind was filled with notions that the movie would be about hauntings and angry ghosts of murder victims returning to take revenge on the house’s new occupants.
I would find out soon how very wrong I was. But it was not a result of misjudgment on my part. Instead, it seems that the trailer was specifically designed to mislead viewers and draw them to the theater to see what was by no means a horror film, but rather just another run-of-the-mill murder mystery.
But before I caught on to any of this, I was glad to find out that my Towers bathroom-mate, Leslie, shared my enthusiasm for the film, and we eagerly tried to round up a group to hit the theater on opening weekend. Much to our disappointment, most of our friends insisted that the movie was far too scary for their taste. How little did they know …
Anyway, after much cajoling and teasing of our cowardly friends, we finally reconciled ourselves to the fact that we were on our own, and we made plans to see the movie Saturday night. We decided on the pricey Mann Chinese 6 at the Hollywood and Highland complex because we thought that this movie was special enough to warrant spending the extra money to watch it in a cooler location than the AMC Promenade 16, where every middle school student in Woodland Hills seems to spend their entire weekend.
So the night finally arrived and we got to the theater just in time to score some of the last tickets left for the 8 p.m. showing. We settled into our very awkwardly placed seats, stomachs full of tasty desert from the Nestle Tollhouse shop, and watched the previews anxiously.
When I looked at my watch next at 9:45 p.m. and realized that the movie had not yet gotten to the “scary part” that I had been waiting and hoping for and fully expecting, I accepted the fact that unless it was a three-hour film, I had probably been quite misled by the very deceptive trailer. Up until that point, the scariest topic the movie had broached was a snake infestation. Wow. Disturbing. And I was right not to hope for much more from that point on.
When the movie finally ended at a quarter past ten, I sat staring blankly at the screen, mouth agape, horrified. Not at the masterfully crafted ending or shocking revelation that would make me think twice about turning the lights off that night, but at the fact that absolutely nothing scary had happened at all. Not one single ghost, not one single creepy incident in the house … nothing. Leslie and I exchanged a disbelieving glance, shook the creaks out of our necks and left the theater in silence.
Looking back, the only good thing about the entire experience was that the frustratingly deceptive trailer had thankfully scared my friends enough to save them $10 each – $10 that could be far better spent at Ralphs or on laundry or on anything else that would be much more worthwhile than this disappointing movie.
October 30, 2003