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What Lies Beneath

What Lies Beneath

List Price: $12.99
Your Price: $9.09
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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: What absolute drivel
Review: If Harrison Ford had acted this badly in Blade Runner or Star Wars, he would never have got anywhere in his career! Come on HF, we expected better than this from you. Give us something worth watching next time.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Awesome edge-of-your-seat flic!!
Review: I've seen this one several times now, and it stills scares the heck out of me, I love it! You gotta' get this one! You'll love the thrills!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Great story, great acting, but...
Review: Like I said the story was great and very original. Also the acting of Harrison Ford, can never be bad. The reason I gave this four stars and not five is because I felt there were scenes in the movie that were indeed important, but just carried on for too long. They could have made it go a little faster.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Suspense
Review: This is a terrific movie. I saw it at the theater & now own a copy. It's one you can watch time and again.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Paralysis?
Review: Yes, it did make me scream, but my threshold for fear is very low.

I wanted to slap the Pfeiffer character as she had the luxury of staying at home and not working, and used this time to do nothing of use, having switched her brain off long before.

She then focused on her neuroses, which had convenient memory lapses to support them.

But the bits that bugged me because they were simply wrong concerned the use of the anaesthetic agent. She lay on the floor paralysed, unable to move any muscle ... but what's that ... she's still breathing! What a wonderful drug! We must introduce it to hospitals as it will make operations safer. Muscle paralysis that is selective so that we don't need to ventilate. Spontaneous breathing with every other muscle paralysed. Chuck out the old drugs that would have stopped breathing too.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great Movie and Great DVD!
Review: I love this DVD!! What Lies Beneath is a great thriller. It will keep you on the end of your sofa!!

The movie begins with Claire and Norman sending their 18 year old daughter off to college. Claire is left with the beautiful lake shore home to finish renevating and a lot of empty time. Norman who is a scientist continues to work hard to make that breakthrough in his research that has been driving his career forward for the past 20 years. Claire begins to hear voices and supspicous things begin to happen in the house that cause her to believe that she is losing her mind. However, upon some research of her own . . . she finds out really what lies beneath the voices and suspiscous happenings.

The DVD sound quality was very good and as always the picture and extra are great!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Very Suspenseful
Review: I put off seeing this movie because I had my doubts about it. I had heard a lot of opinions about Harrison Ford's character being hard to accept. I finally broke down and rented WLB and I'm not sorry that I did.

I really couldn't stand Michelle Pfieffer's character, who is a bored little homemaker with too much time on her hands and a very nosy disposition. However, my reaction to her character was due to some good acting on her part. Pfieffer really did a good job bringing out her character's more annoying and compulsive behaviors.

Harrison Ford's character is a departure from what he usually plays and may be a little hard to swallow but who says he always has to play the hero or adventurer. He wasn't great but he wasn't bad either. Just have an open mind.

The plot itself was pretty good. When the supernatural things start happening, the movie gets pretty freaky. All the ghostly apparitions are not in your face but more concentrated in things you hear or "sense". They'll keep you on your toes. The movie will set the kind of atmosphere where you can grab someone sitting next to you and scare them out of their shoes. The story really didnt' start moving for a while so you may be pretty bored halfway through the movie but give it a chance, the plot picks up and has a pretty good ending.

I'm not going to give away the ending, but look for something in the ground in the final scene as the camera pans back; it's pretty freaky and will give you a real chill.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A ZINGER FROM ZEMECKIS
Review: Yes, Harrison Ford receives top billing, and he does a creditable job in his role as stuffy professor Norman Spencer. But, let's face it---this movie belongs to the superb Michelle Pfeiffer, in an overlooked, should have been Oscar nominated performance. Michelle portrays Norman's wife, Clare, a woman who has seemingly had a difficult year since a strange auto accident the year before the movie starts. First thing you know she's sure that their new neighbor has killed his bizzare wife. And, what's worse, a ghost is haunting Michelle, and she's sure it's the wife's ghost that's doing it.

Aha...that's just the start. Robert Zemeckis, like Brian DePalma, pays homage to the great Alfred Hitchcock in this really spooky film. Unlike DePalma, however, Zemeckis doesn't copy Hitch, but translates his style into Zemecki's own. It's a brilliant directorial effort, again worthy of an Oscar nomination. Diana Scarwid as Jody, Clare's friend, is also superb in a supporting role, bringing a little bit of humor and pizzazz to Clare's spooky life.

The plot twists and turns, in spite of the movie's trailer revealing something it shouldn't have, but it still works, thanks to the dominance of Pfeiffer in the leading role. Her "possession" by the ghost reveals a sensual sexiness few actresses can pull off as convincingly.

The visual effects are stunning, and the last thirty minutes or so of the movie is spine-tingling in its intensity. A real winner of a movie, that demonstrates that Harrison and Michelle are not over the hill. This movie made well over a hundred million, and it's one of the best spook stories in recent years.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Movie 4, DVD 2
Review: Considering Robert Zemeckis gave the world one of the first deluxe DVDs, 1997's Contact, it's startling to note how lackluster the What Lies Beneath DVD materials are. The movie itself is a stylish thriller, confident enough to take its sweet time setting up the payoffs in the last act. Much has been made about how the trailers for theatrical release gave away far too much about the plot, so I won't make the same mistake here. Suffice it to say, Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford play a married couple dealing with empty-nest syndrome, some strange new neighbors, and some spooky goings on hitting much closer to home. The film is deliberately designed to evoke Hitchcock, from its plot points, to its characterizations, to specific shots and settings. By the time Alan Silvestri's score goes into full Herrmann mode and the camera swoops from the stratosphere to the interior of a moving car, this movie could be a film-school drinking game. And of course, the essential letterboxing is preserved on DVD, with a choice of Dolby or DTS sound presentation. The disappointment on this DVD comes from its extra features, which are more "bogus" than "bonus". First, there's a dry-as-dust commentary by Zemeckis and producer Steve Starkey, whose most revealing insight about the cast is that Michelle Pfeiffer dislikes the rain. There are a few fairly interesting bits about the construction of the house, but that's about as technical as the commentary ever gets. The film has an astonishing shot that begins above a woman lying on a floor, then goes under the floor to look up at her from below. Want to know how they did it? Zemeckis won't tell. In fact, he specifically says, "We'll never tell how we did that shot." The brief making-of featurette (which originally ran on HBO) features some teasing glimpses of some of the green-screen technology used, but that's all you get. Take that, film students. (Zemeckis went to the USC film school; maybe he just doesn't want anyone learning for free what he had to pay tuition for.) Zemeckis should've followed the example of the Matrix DVD, which allowed viewers to see extensive footage of the effects sequences. So the movie, on its own, is well worth a look, especially for fans of classic thrillers. But for DVD fans, What Lies Beneath only scratches the surface.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Poor Start, Good Ending.
Review: This movie didn't scare me as much as I thought it would. It started off pretty typical to me, except the part where Pfeiffer has the dream of being drowned in the bathtub. The mother and stepfather had an empty nest for the first time in sixteen years only to find out there was something else going on beneath the surface. The ending was good though, but I recommend renting before you plan to purchase.


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