Stir of Echoes (DVD)

Tom Witzky (Kevin Bacon) is just an average Chicago Joe working hard as a telephone lineman to make ends meet for his family. Wife, Maggie (Kathryn Erbe), and clever young Jake (Zachary David Cope) have settled in nicely, but we the viewers see right from the start that Jake is special. Tom, well he fancies himself to be a rational, practical, and sensible man; a skeptic of life's mysteries, great or small. His sister-in-law, Lisa (Illeana Douglas), can irritate him by her very presence simply because she prefers to embrace the inexplicable. Tom and Maggie are new to the neighborhood, but were quick to make friends in the tightly knit, and relentlessly ...

If you saw the smash hit Bruce Willis ghost story The Sixth Sense, then you probably let this one sneak by you. The hype surrounding that movie virtually eclipsed this one which was released at around the same time and followed on the same kind of theme. Stir of Echoes features Kevin Bacon as an ordinary family man living with his wife and son in a typical Chicago suburb. He is a typical working class guy and life is pretty avergae. However, when his hippy sister-in-law comes over and hypnotises him for a party trick, his life is about to change. She leaves a suggestion that he should open his mind more to paranormal activities...the result being disturbing ...

Due to the cannibalistic nature of the Hollywood system, there have been several instances over the past decade where two films with very similar storylines have been released in a short span of time. We?ve had Volcano vs. Dante?s Peak, ANTZ vs. A Bug?s Life, Armageddon vs. Deep Impact, Showgirls vs. Striptease. In all of these cases, there was always one film that outperformed the other, both financially and critically, though it could be argued whether either party - critics and moviegoers alike - had really picked the better film. This past fall, we had another competition between similar films. The Sixth Sense was released in August, and Stir of Echoes followed in ...