Jonathan Jackson simply wasn't the guy to pull off this role, not that I'm convinced it was a good role to start with. When playing his own imaginary doppelganger kept speaking with him on-camera, it would've been nice if he could at least pretend to be looking at himself convincingly. He was just awful.
To some extent this is a shaggy-dog version of the urban folktale of "the vanishing hitchhiker." As an anti-buddy "road picture" about a clinically depressed young man haunted by his own terrors & his faithful companion the menacing ghost, it should've been a lot more interesting than this.
The story takes forever to introduce David Arquette as the Ghostly Menace, but when he's finally on board, the film has at least one actor who can grab a viewer's attention, & of course the B-horror incidents were in full sway by then, so I never felt like not watching it to the end.
Stephen King's signature sense of "humanity" facing the unknown is the important element that is not pulled off very well. But if you removed the first half hour of this thing so that Arquette appeared sooner, it wouldn't be but a half-bad tale.
copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl
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