Posted: 01/14/2005

White Noise

(2005)

by Hank Yuloff

I found myself sitting next to Leonard Maltin at a screening of White Noise last night. I am a big fan of his industry books and love to hear him interviewed on the subject of film. I wish I could have done one of those interviews instead of seeing this movie.

The premise of White Noise is that the dead are able to contact the living through Electronic Voice Phenomena—the background noise created by radios and televisions. We just are not tuned in enough to understand them. And just like there are some good people and bad people who are alive, there are some good people and bad people who are dead. And they want to continue causing trouble. Michael Keaton stars as Jonathon Rivers, an architect whose wife dies in a suspicious manner and he is having a hard time accepting that she is gone. But she may not be.

He is visited by Raymond Price (played by Ian McNeice from I’ll Be There, A Life Less Ordinary) who has become an expert in EVP since the death of his son. Price carries a message that Anna Rivers is attempting to contact him. At first Keaton is skeptical, but, as in all good horror flicks, “things happen” that make him not only believe, but fully embrace the theories to the point of distraction from everything else in his life. Good thing he is a partner at his architectural firm, or we would see him lose his job. Maybe the scene of his business going bankrupt was edited out.

Keaton (Live from Baghdad, Pacific Heights) is superb. His performance is better than the movie. Which has plot holes and complications that just made my head shake instead of my body quake. Without giving away the story, there is one point where Anna (played by Chandra West of Salton Sea and last season’s NYPD Blue) appears as a ghost, but no longer on the television screen and not as any other ghost has been seen. And when one character is being killed by bad ghosts, it is all flashes of light and camera trickery, we don’t see what is happening, so we can not be scared. In the end, we see the who the bad guy (the alive one) really is, and its a good thing director Geoffrey Sax gives us a quick flashback to where we see this person earlier in the film or it would not have made any sense at all. All of Sax’s previous work is as a TV director (and nothing that was popular) so maybe this was just a big jump on his learning curve.

White Noise is an early entry to my Worst Films of 2005 list. By the way, my wife’s one word review of this movie: Uuccthhhh! (Bet THAT doesn’t get on the poster.)

Hank Yuloff is one of our writers in Los Angeles, a.k.a. Land of the Walking Dead.

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