Yep. It’s baffling to me how few “horror” directors understand that you must do ALL THE WORK to set up genuine characters for the audience or else nobody is scared by or invested in the horror that comes.

I could have watched an entire Star Trek series, or film, built around his Commander Shran character.

"ohh my! That is *quite* toxic."

Jeffrey Combs matches the intensity and weirdness of the CGI and makeup in the film, but just using his own face...

​@@JoelJessuphe is Soo good of a actor that made me endure transformers prime

There are actors who act the same in every movie, Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger etc, and then there are actors who transform their entire being it's almost impossible to recognise them, Jeffery Combs is one of them...

I thought exactly that! When the Frank character is at the end of his tether in the prison cell while Lucy visits him, that dead-eyed, taut, teary desperation somehow says to me this is played by a man who has been dealt a bad hand in real life. Very happy we still have Fox with us almost thirty years later.

Saw it recently and thought the same.

He would adopt this style of mini manic acting as a way of masking his symptoms into his performance on his series Spin City the following year. As an avid watcher of him on Family Ties, I remember watching Spin City from the pilot on and knew immediately that something with him was off. I didn't think it was anything like the life changing medical issue it was that he hid at the time still, but I used to study his comedic timing on Ties and Back To The Future, Secret Of My Success, even the dramas Light Of Day and Bright Lights, Big City and, yes, there were manic moments in the scripts of all these projects, to be sure, that Michael excels at. He's actually a phenomenal athletic performer. But, my point being, he used to be a comedic sevant at this one certain comic acting ability trait which was what I called Coiled Spring-Money Line which was to have another character opposite him do the set up where they give a long winded diatribe about something absurd. When said person stop talking to let the moment then just hang there in the air and the inane ridiculousness of the words seem to grow more palpably absurd with each awkward silent passing second, while the rest of the cast would be buying time till the cringe of the moment passed on its own, Michael would already be mischievously sizing up the person and situation perfectly still like a silent assassin waiting to pounce. Which just the anticipation of waiting for what smart ass retort he was going to say would get a laugh. Sometimes he would have some stage prop business like his usual go-to was holding a glass with a beverage he was about to sip. When his co-star began their tirade, Michael would raise the glass right to his lips, stop, hold, wait till speech was done, still hold, eyes would dart around like, WTF was THAT?, then slowly lower glass, look down, pretend to be thinking about the plight of mankind and space-time, look up at person, lock in with the thinest of smirks and Lazer lock eye contact with scene partner and then---BLAMO!--deliver the death blow money shot punchline and lay waste always to thunderous studio audience applause. And then resume his beverage and finally sip. Bam, boom, cut, check the gate, scene! But the key element to its tension ratcheting success was Michael's insane level of craftsmanship and talent to perfectly pace out the wait and hold of the bit, the discipline and restraint, and pitch perfect inherent timing to hit the money line at the exact right time, every time. It was the stillness of him in wait like an apex predator crotched and poised ready to pounce on its outmatched prey. That was Michael's bread and butter for seven years on Family Ties. But, by the time Spin City hit the airwaves, that stillness of acting choice to keep an audience on the meat hook excruciatingly in suspense waiting for the shoe to drop and Michael to lower the boom. Yeah, that instrument of destruction was no longer in his arsenal. He would do a watered down version of it, still attempting to hold the moment and delay of punchline gratification thing, but in place of stillness was him moving around, fidgeting, gyrating for no apparent reason, then punchline. That's what gave it away for me something was sus about Michael. At the time, I would yell at the TV telling an imaginary stage hand 'somebody sit on him.' Eventually I got used to it and he was remarkably good at concealing the physical side effects of Parkinsons the first few years of it and the four years he was on the show. He's really one of the all time great comedic great of television and film. Legend.

Wow, it's true great minds do think alike. I too, among you all, noticed the very same thing. 💙💯👍

For me its him lol

IMO he should have suggested Raimi as the Hobbit director. Raimi had done fantasy-with-comedic-elements in Army of Darkness.

Dead Alive is a good one

@@andrewgrove1691that it is. It’s really good.

I LOVED DEAD ALIVE!!!! I consistently rented when I was 14 years old. Hilarious and always a go to Zombie film.

​@@andrewgrove1691 Bad taste (his 1st movie) is good too. It doesn't compare to Braindead/DeadAlive but considering it's a thrown together first effort with virtually no budget, it's pretty decent. ....or indecent, depending on how you look at it.

Brain-dead and bad taste were amazing but LOTR and King Kong sucked so hard

The Frighteners is Ghostbusters if it was directed by Sam Raimi, instead of Ivan Reitman.

Except ghostbusters technically has no real plot arc. Four dudes start a business to catch ghost, then they catch ghosts. That’s pretty much it. The Frighteners is MULTIPLE genuine plot arcs.

@@Madbandit77the plot of frighteners is light years beyond the plot of ghostbusters . Ghostbusters was great, but essentially just a theme park ride. No character development, no real narrative interest. It’s funny and fun and loud, but it doesn’t have any meaning. Frighteners is fully loaded with narrative.

Or in the old days, Weird Science. CGI works there where it does not work in "Last Starfighter"