What Lies Beneath

by Vivian Rose, age 15, from the US

While "What Lies Beneath" is basically a movie for my mom's generation (roughly the same over-the-hill age bracket as Harrison Ford) I found it to be a fairly captivating horror movie.

Of course, not all people his age are as well- preserved as Harrison Ford - he may be fifty -or whatever his age is- but he still has a pretty good body. And that crooked grin sure is charming.

So charming, in fact, that his character attracts much younger women. When he has an affair with one of them, he tries to hide if from his wife (Michelle Pfeiffer). (The younger woman, Madison, is a college student, and he is her professor, so the situation could be professionally embarrassing too.)

A year after Madison mysteriously disappears (how original for a horror movie), Pfeiffer's daughter leaves for college. Now a bored homemaker with little to do, Pfeiffer starts spying on the new neighbors. (Didn't she ever hear of reading a book or watching TV to amuse herself?) Unfortunately, she doesn't manage to be inconspicuous. At any rate, she becomes convinced that their neighbor murdered his wife. Caution, this may be a bit of a plot spoiler - but the neighbor subplot dead ends and has nothing to do with the real spook story. That would involve the missing girl, whose ghost begins haunting Pfeiffer.

"What Lies Beneath" is hardly the best horror movie I've seen, but it does have some suspenseful scenes. The acting was worthwhile, too. However, I think "What Lies Beneath" would actually have been a much better comedy - stupid snoops like Pfeiffer's character and noisy neighbors are great comic fodder.

Rating: PG-13 (For terror/violence, sexual content, and some language)