Cold Creek Manor
To the endless list of phobias in the world -- fear of cats, fear of crowds, fear of Celine Dion records -- "Cold Creek Manor" adds a new one: fear of locals. Directed by the talented, wayward British director Mike Figgis ("Leaving Las Vegas," "Timecode"), the film is a disquieting and often very funny examination of yuppie unease in the country. The problem is, it's disguised as a dopey suspense thriller. Dennis Quaid and Sharon Stone play Cooper and Leah Tilson (even the names are from Pottery Barn), a Manhattan couple who, seeking a fresh start, relocate themselves and their two adolescent children to upstate New York. They're true city mice: She's a businesswoman with frequent-flier miles to spare, he's a documentary filmmaker and a brusquely loving househusband. In other words, lunchmeat.
With innocent rapacity, the Tilsons purchase a huge brick farmhouse in a foreclosure proceeding. It features an in-ground pool, 1,200 acres of land, and stables, all designed to make "This Old House" junkies swoon at the makeover possibilities. The place is also fully furnished with the previous owners' furniture and belongings, some decidedly on the creepy side, but just when it looks as if "Cold Creek Manor" is turning into real estate porn, along comes Stephen Dorff as Dale Massie, the previous owner himself.
Fresh out of jail, Dale's the kind of politely insinuating, secretly resentful bantam cock every passive-aggressive city dweller fears he'll have to deal with. The Tilsons agree to let him help renovate the house -- the first of many times the audience may bark in disbelief -- and you can just about tick off the seconds until snakes start appearing in everyone's bed.
Actually, that sequence is the best screaming-meemie moment in the movie; the Tilsons subsequently behave with such startling stupidity that you understand why everyone in town treats them like sheep with money. Scene after scene hammers home Dale's psycho-trash credentials -- his slatternly girlfriend is played by Juliette Lewis, for Pete's sake -- but even after something nasty ends up in the swimming pool, Cooper and Leah don't think to pack their kids off to safety. Eventually they get wise to their nemesis's gruesome secret, which leads to a classic don't-even-think-about-going-in-that-dark-pit moment, as well as a ridiculous rooftop climax. During a blinding rainstorm.
It's the quieter character-driven scenes that stay with you more than all this boogedy-woogedy. Stone, in her first major release in four years, has depressingly little to do, but Quaid plays Cooper as a well-meaning simp, and the sequence where he tries to mend fences with Dale in a smoky, hostile poolroom is a small triumph of bourgeois paranoia. So's the scene in which Cooper visits Dale's father in a nursing home: The patriarch, played by an unrecognizable Christopher Plummer, turns out to be a vicious old goat who goes against every notion Cooper has of benevolent yuppie fatherhood.
The root source of "Cold Creek Manor," of course, is Sam Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs," the 1971 shocker in which nebbish Dustin Hoffman wreaks revenge against his small-town British tormentors. Figgis, Quaid, and Dorff know they're playing a more American version of class-war chicken, though, and before "Cold Creek Manor" gets swamped by its own inept genre conventions, they deliver moments to unnerve educated urbanites and hearten everyone else. Call it mullet-phobia.
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