The new Jacob's Ladder, creeping quietly into theaters this week after an even quieter DISH premiere, doesn't skimp on the demonic visions, exactly. There are, again, shape-shifting vagrants, skittering around the edges of the frame, their faces suddenly twisting from normal to Halloween-mask frightening. And the film offers its own doses of Lyne's trippiest and most imitated trick: heads jerking around on necks in a fast-motion blur, like the wings of a dragonfly. Yet there's something curiously perfunctory about these unholy encounters—and not just because the phantoms have been conjured, unconvincingly, from computers this time. David M. Rosenthal, the director, stages the scares with little imagination or verve; they come across like a begrudging sop to horror fans, stuck in there purely out of obligation. Why remake Jacob's Ladder if you're not going to try to compete at all with its nightmare fuel, the very element that earned it a following and, you know, a remake?
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