THE CRICHTONERS

THE FRIGHTENERS (1996)
dir: Peter Jackson

THE CRICHTONERS
Cracked Monster Party #36, Winter 1996
w: Andy Simmons
a: Bruce Bolinger

Frank Bannister (Michael J. Fox) has a business getting rid of ghosts. It's a scam where he's able to see the dead, which are harmless, but has befriended a few to haunt people he meets so he can allegedly exorcise their homes. A married couple, Ray (Pete Dobson) and Lucy (Trini Alvarado) call on him to get them out of their house.

People have numbers tattooed on their forehead to show their the next to go, which only Frank can see. One is discovered on Ray. Frank's partners in crime are Cyrus (Chi McBride) and Stuart (Jim Fyfe), Frank later runs into the ghost of Ray and arranges dinner with Lucy explaining how he can speak to Ray, and how a car accident makes him able to speak to the dead.

Frank witnesses a death in the bathroom, tries to prevent it knowing of it through his psychic powers, but is unable to beat the Grim Reaper. and is accused of the deaths that have been taking place. When he is arrested, he is questioned by agent Milton Dammers (Jeffrey Combs). Lucy comes to visit him in his cell and he sees she is next to be taken.

The back of Fox's shirt is a pun on his series Family Ties. At the police station looking through the window is the smoking man from The X Files

. The Grim Reaper comes for Lucy and Frank gets her out in time and escapes. The only way for Frank to beat the Reaper is to have an out-of-body experience and kill him as a ghost. Lucy is a doctor with access to a cryogenics lab and freezes him so he can temporarily die, but she almost doesn't get him out because she's captured by Dammers.

The parody omits it, but they eventually find out who Death is, and he's the corpse of a serial killer who also possesses the body of a former teenage mental patient, and together they've been commiting murders similar to those of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate.

Among other things they leave out for this is a character played by R. Lee Ermey, most famous for his role as a drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, and spending most of his career playing a parody of that character.