TOWER OF TERROR
US, 1997, 89 minutes, .Colour.
Steve Guttenberg, Kirsten Dunst, Nia Peeples, Michael Mc Shane, Amzie Strickland, Melora Hardin, Alistair Duncan, Lindsay Ridgeway, John Franklin, Wendy Worthington.
Directed by D.J.Mc Hale.
Tower of Terror is a Disney film, with touches of horror, the designed for the family, especially children’s audience which adults will be able to sit through. It is a screen version of one of those rides at Disneyland/Disney World.
Steve Guttenberg plays reporter for one of those National Enquirer sensationalist tabloids, but has fallen on bad times. His girlfriend is giving up on him. He decides to go to the site of an old hotel where, 60 years earlier, something dreadful happened. His partner in work is his niece, Anna, Kirsten Dunst, early in her career.
The film spends most of its time with the investigation, wandering through the hotel, its creepy atmosphere, encountering some of the staff, especially a busboy from the time who gives some explanations what happened.
The film also goes back the 60 years, to the heyday of Hollywood in the 1930s, to a child star, her parents, her guardian, agents… And a celebrity party. When the star and her parents and guardian get into an elevator, it can go only to the 11th and for 60 years, the people trapped in the elevator have wandered the hotel unable to get out.
The journalist encounters an elderly woman who tells the story of the time, with a touch of the witch, but a revelation in this that she is sister of the child star. There had been some suspicions of the guardian – but these are false suspicions.
The task is for the investigators to find something that belonged to each of the ghosts and, at Halloween, having these possessions, enabling the ghosts, at last, to be free.
There is also a mysterious young woman, an applicant to be a journalist, who intrigues the journalist – but is finally revealed as one of the ghosts.
This is all PG rated fright and fantasy, focusing on the investigation, a range of characters from the past and the present, members of the heyday of Hollywoodland - and something to entertain the young children.
