| 70 |
The New York Times
The movie ultimately belongs to Mr. Dorff, whose villain is as frightening as any human reptile to have slithered onto the screen in quite some time.
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| 70 |
Los Angeles Times
A lightweight popcorn movie, hardly the scariest of the year but with enough jolts to be satisfying. Writer Richard Jefferies' solid script emphasizes character and psychology over plot and provides Dennis Quaid and Sharon Stone with engaging, multidimensional starring roles.
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| 63 |
Boston Globe
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.
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| 63 |
Chicago Tribune
Perhaps Figgis proves his unconventionality with Cold Creek Manor after all, creating a thriller without resorting to the genre's usual bag of tricks.
|
| 50 |
Entertainment Weekly
The journey, however, is a hollow one, since Quaid and Stone, for all their efforts, never really do seem married. Perhaps that's because Stone, with her dry-ice charisma, does everything that an actress should except connect to whomever she happens to be facing on screen.
|
| 50 |
Variety
A woefully predictable imperiled-yuppie-family-under-siege suspenser that hardly seems worth the attention of its relatively high-profile participants.
|
| 50 |
Salon.com
Feels very nicely made, at least until it falls apart: By its midpoint, you start to recognize that it has acute creepy-thrilleritis, which means that it promises us some things at the beginning that it has no intention of actually following up on.
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| 50 |
San Francisco Chronicle
As haunted-house thrillers go, Cold Creek Manor is more ludicrous than the average but at the same time more handsomely produced.
|
| 50 |
Christian Science Monitor
Figgis brings strong visual imagination to the first hour, but he can't rescue Richard Jefferies's screenplay from plot holes bigger than the manor itself.
|
| 50 |
USA Today
Will leave audiences yawning rather than gasping from fear.
|
| 50 |
New York Daily News
The jolts are mild and too easily anticipated.
|
| 50 |
Slate
The first hour is evocative and creepy...But once the trajectory is clear and the squeamish New York intellectual Quaid has to stand up and fight for his homestead, the boringness seeps into you like the damp.
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| 42 |
Portland Oregonian
Cobbled together from other sources without much thought to originality.
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| 42 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Most of the publicity for Cold Creek Manor seems to imply that it's an occult thriller, specifically a Stephen King-ish haunted house movie. But no. This is a severe case of mistaken identity: In fact, there's not a supernatural bone in the movie's body.
|
| 40 |
TV Guide
All of which would be fine if Figgis managed to work up any real suspense, but the film slogs towards its inevitable mano-a-mano showdown like something up to its knees in mud.
|
| 40 |
Chicago Reader
It takes forever to get moving, but when it finally does, the Quaid and Stone characters still seem ill defined.
|
| 40 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
In one of the most laughable confrontations between humanity and nature since Elisha Cuthbert stared down the cougar on "24," Quaid's family runs amok in the house, as each member simultaneously discovers a carefully placed snake meant to scare them off the property, almost as if the snakes were working off a timer system. The film never recovers.
|
| 40 |
Film Threat
Figgis has spent too many years crafting thoughtful, innovative films to have much of a knack for storytelling this mechanical and many are the moments when he does indeed seem to have been asleep behind the wheel.
|
| 40 |
LA Weekly
Cold Creek Manor's prime reason for being seems to be a set piece involving poisonous snakes, directed by Figgis with a drunken gusto the rest of the film could use, and as a comeback vehicle for Stone, who tries hard at motherly warmth, but can't quite wash the Catherine Tramell out of her hair.
|
| 38 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
The most disturbing aspect of Cold Creek Manor -- a predictable, disjointed "Cape Fear" knockoff -- is that a script this disjointed and unoriginal could actually get the Hollywood green light.
|
| 38 |
Premiere
Clunky and riddled with clichés from start to finish, which is a shame because the cast is able and is led by Oscar-nominated director Mike Figgis.
|
| 38 |
Chicago Sun-Times
[Figgis] has made a thriller that thrills us only if we abandon all common sense. Of course preposterous things happen in all thrillers, but there must be at least a gesture in the direction of plausibility, or we lose patience.
|
| 38 |
New York Post
Richard Jeffries' script tosses together bits of plot borrowed from such "bad things happen when you leave the city" classics as "Straw Dogs" and "Deliverance" without any awareness of how or why genre conventions work.
|
| 30 |
Washington Post
Reilly Capps
This movie isn't a thriller, it's an insomnia killer.
|
| 30 |
Austin Chronicle
About as thrilling as cleaning out your garage.
|
| 30 |
Village Voice
CCM's dissipated endgame borrows soggily from "The Ring," resulting in something that wouldn't make it past the first script meeting for Scary Movie 4.
|
| 25 |
Rolling Stone
It's sad to see risk-taking director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas, Hotel) do a generic thriller for a paycheck and then not even screw with the rules.
|
| 20 |
Film Threat
Kevin Carr
Figgis is clueless on how to make a thriller. He falls into all the traps of a first-time suspense director, and he can't help but focus on all the depressing faults of the shockingly dull characters.
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| 20 |
The Hollywood Reporter
It's discouraging to witness a filmmaker who clearly yearns for the indie world yield to the temptations of mindless movie manufacturing. At least Figgis made it as soulless as possible.
|
| 20 |
Dallas Observer
Deafeningly dull movie.
|
| 20 |
Wall Street Journal
A gothic thriller called Cold Creek Manor extrudes an 80-minute idea -- I may be overgenerous here -- into 118 minutes that feel like an eternity.
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