Movie
Directed by David Koepp, STIR OF ECHOES borrows bits and pieces from THE SHINING and POLTERGEIST. Although he has more experience writing, Koepp has actually created an entertaining ghost story. It's one that is creepy, not gory. It is much scarier than the other ghost story, THE SIXTH SENSE. ECHOES wasn't near as successful as THE SIXTH SENSE, but I'll take Kevin Bacon's seeing of ghosts over Haley Joel Osment's any time.
Disc
This disc gets treated nicely from the folks at Artisan. The menus are very impressive, with nice animation and sound. My one complaint is you have to wait at least a minute before you even get to select a menu option. Yep, each time that disc loads, there is about 1-1/2 minutes of animation before any options show up...and you can't skip! The features, while plentiful, could have been better. Sure, you get the commentary, but the featurettes are way too short. The promotional is 2 1/2, the Koepp one is 2, and the Bacon one is 1 1/2 minutes. They all provide some neat information, but they should have been longer. The beind-the-scenes footage is also good, yet it's badly edited. The package says "16:9 Fullscreen Version". This is confusing, but it simply means it's full on a widescreen tv. For us poor folks, that translates to 1.78:1 ratio. Artisan is the only studio that does this, but most will beging printing that information when we all get widescreen tvs in about 5 years. The video is flawless, by the way. No artifacts whatsoever. It's a dark film, but everything has great detail. The audio, while not heavy, does its job. The movie is mostly dialogue, with a few surround effects. In all, another nice package from Artisan.
Overall
This is better than Sixth Sense, and has some very cool menus, minus the 1 minute wait on every start-up. The ending is alittle flat, but there are just enough good pieces of the story to make it interesting. Do you hear that? It's an echo saying "recommended".
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