What Lies Beneath
Go ahead, try not to pee your pants.

Harrison Ford: Hotness that defies age barriers.

You know how they have those signs when you're in line for a rollercoaster? "People with back, neck, or heart problems should not ride this ride." I think they should also put those signs up outside theaters playing What Lies Beneath. I'm a mostly healthy young woman and I still came out of the theater with an aching neck and brand new heart murmur.

I feel I should point out that I've seen lots of scary movies. I'm certainly not a wussy, and it's not that easy to frighten me these days unless you're using the words "Britney Spears" and "Buffy" in the same sentence. But when people ask me how the movie was, I can't seem to find enough adjectives. I've over-used "terrifying" at this point. "Frightening" seems too soft. These days I just twitch and shudder and feel that that speaks well enough for me.

You probably think I'm kidding. I'm not. I was really, really scared. People actually screamed in the theater. And these weren't cheap thrills, either. It seems like a pretty simple plot: A perfect marriage is nearly destroyed when the husband's affair from the past comes back to haunt him... literally. But it's not as clear-cut as it sounds, thankfully. This movie was all masterfully built tension, cunning suspense, crafty plot twists, genuine scares and 100% pure terror. It's a very cerebral movie, but you can almost feel the physical threat oozing from the screen. It's enough to make you run out of the theater screaming like a little girl. Though Michelle Pfeiffer dominates the first half of the film, slowly slipping Rear Window-type scares while her husband is working on some important work of his, Harrison Ford cleanly steals the show in the latter half, delivering a performance that is one of the best in his career. In fact, just for that, I forgive him for Six Days, Seven Nights.

Michelle Pfeiffer as Claire, soakin' in the creepy atmosphere.

Of course, the scares delivered in What Lies Beneath aren't terribly new; instead, they harken back to the old days of horror... you know, when the films were actually scary instead of just bloody. But despite director Robert Zemeckis and writer Clark Gregg's obvious draws on Hitchcock-ian horror -- which is hard to avoid considering how much horror ground Hitchcock covered and how well he did it -- the film isn't too derivative. It has its problems, too, like a couple of those standard horror scenes that make you want to scream, "No, dumbass, don't go down there! Run the hell away, you idiot!" There's also several obvious set-ups, and several more scenes where you wonder just what the hell these people are thinking of, but despite all that, What Lies Beneath comes out on top, delivering genuine scares and good old fashioned entertainment.

DROOL FACTOR: One of the great mysteries of the universe is how it is that Harrison Ford retains his sexiness even as a bonafide old guy. But it doesn't really matter, 'cause his presence makes for a real mother/daughter bonding film: you both can lust over the lead together.

GROSS-OUT FACTOR: The effects in this movie are realistic and haunting, proving that less is more and providing a pretty slim gross-out factor.

STRONG CHICK FACTOR: I was never much for Michelle Pfeiffer, but she pretty much kicks ass in this film, not so much in the literal sense but more... uh... just go watch it. You'll see.

-- Lisa Kincaid

What Lies Beneath is now playing nationwide in the United States.

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