I Guess You Can Make a Good Movie Based on a Bad Book
I'm not trying to insult Richard Matheson, who has received critical accliam for his writing, but I read his book A Stir of Echoes, which this movie is based on, and it really wasn't that good. However, the movie that they made starring Kevin Bacon, of all people, did a lot to improve on the story. I wouldn't call it a cinematic masterpiece or anything, but it wasn't that bad. The main character was much more interesting (in the book he was a pretty bland character, even with psychic type abilities), and the effects added a lot.
Kevin Bacon as Tom Witzky
Life can get pretty monotonous for a blue collar worker in a Chicago suburb. All Tom Witzky (Kevin Bacon, Apollo 13, A Few Good Men, Tremors, Flatliners and about a million other movies) seems to do is go to work and come home to his wife Maggie (Kathryn Erbe, D2: The Mighty Ducks, What About Bob?) and his young son Jake (Zachary David Cope, Motion Picture Debut). Every once in a while his sister-in-law Lisa (Illeana Douglas, TV's "Action") stops by, and sometimes he even gets to go to a neighbors party and have a few beers (lucky day!). All of that changes one night at one of those neighbors parties. Lisa tags along and gets to talking about some of the people she has hypnotized. Many people at the party, including Tom, don't beleive she can really hypnotize anyone so he dares her to hypnotize him. He wakes up after the hypnosis to the amazement of all the party goers. Later that night Tom starts having weird visions of a teenage girl in his house and he starts getting psychic "feelings." He just thinks he is going a little crazy until his babysitter shows him a picture of her younger, missing sister and he sees that the girl in the picture is the same girl he has been seeing in his house. He then begins to search for the missing, driven by psychic visions that the apparently dead girl is sending him. But when he discovers the truth he can't believe what he has seen.
Tom's Wife Maggie (Kathyrn Erbe) is worried that he has gone nuts
Just so you know, the plot of the book is slightly different, and much more boring. However David Koepp did a great job converting an intriging, but not very exciting book into an interesting and exciting screenplay. The screenplay transformed a paranormal book with a mystery type subplot into a mystery movie with paranormal undertones. The main character is trying to solve the mystery of the missing girl, but his only guide is the visions he is being fed by the dead girl. Kevin Bacon's character may be fairly flat and uninteresting, but he is just a normal Joe who is having extraordinary experiences, which is what makes you empathize with him. He is being driven by an unknown force that even he doesn't understand. Even if you are like me and have read the book, the movie is quite different and it always makes you wonder what is going to happen next. And if you haven't read the book and like a good mystery movie, this gives you plenty of chances to guess what happened, and you still probably won't be right (at least not completely). Finally, the special effects (even though they are few and far between) help add to the story immensly, and they are pretty cool too. Overall, I thought that Stir of Echoes was a pretty "neat" movie, plus it gives you one more group of actors to link to in the Kevin Bacon Game.
