What it’s about: Paranormal investigator Frank Bannister (Fox) is a con man—not because he can’t actually communicate with ghosts, but because he’s in cahoots with a motley crew of them (Astin, McBride, Fyfe) to set up hauntings that he can conveniently solve for a steep fee. But when the loutish husband (Dobson) of a plucky young doctor (Alvarado) dies mysteriously shortly after becoming one of Frank’s marks, he and the new widow stumble onto a much more sinister spiritual threat—one with ties to both the town’s murderous history and Frank’s own tragic past.

Reflections: Comedy-horror can be a very difficult line to walk and several contemporary critics—notably including Roger Ebert—found this film to be a frenetically uneven mess. It absolutely is, but that’s kind of what makes it work. Jackson throws everything at the wall here—serial killers, car chases, mummy sex, a trip to heaven, an abandoned sanitarium, an unexplained drill sergeant, a jailbreak, hemorrhoid pillows, garden gnomes—into a cartoonish extravaganza that manages to be as creepy as it is loony and barely gives the audience a minute to breathe. It’s more committed to its horror than the schlocky insanity of Bad Taste or Meet the Feebles, but it also proudly wears it’s B-movie inspirations—stuffed with canted angles and ridiculous lines like “my body is a road map of pain!”—on its sleeve, without any of the gravitas or emotionality of Heavenly Creatures or The Lord of the Rings, the movies he made on either side of it. The result is something that’s difficult to pigeonhole and winds up being kind of memorable for it.

This is aided by the performances that run the gamut from Fox’s weary, sometimes even vulnerable hero (his last live-action lead role in a film, as of writing) to… whatever the hell Jeffrey Combs is doing. Not everything works; the central romance between Fox and Alvarado doesn’t totally land, Dobson’s character is a heavy part of the first half before being unceremoniously dismissed, McCarthy’s sinister old matron and Hawthorne’s stuck-up newspaper editor are a little flat and underutilized. But there’s a kind of energetic willingness to do whatever that pervades every part of the film and the inventive visual effects and early CGI hold up far better than a lot of its contemporaries, making its flaws easier to overlook as long as one isn’t expecting serious art, thematic complexity, or intense scares and just wants to have a spooky good time.

This was one of the first R-rated movies I ever saw as a teenager—its lenticular box art stood out on the shelves of Movie Time Video—and I remember thinking at the time it was an underrated gem. Watching it now, nearly 30 years later, it has the makings of a cult classic—not exactly good, necessarily, but strange and singular enough to be worth revisiting. If you’ve never seen it, put it on at a Halloween party, watch it with friends, and enjoy soaking up some audacious nonsense where everyone was clearly having a lot of fun.