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Over the last eight years, he's given us, among many ventures, a moving, dark portrait of a boozer determined to drink himself to death (the Oscar-winning “Leaving Las Vegas”), a clock-obsessed, multi-frame exploration of a single story from four different directions (the interesting “Timecode”) and a totally out-there depiction of cannibalism, lurid sex and murder at a European hotel as a dysfunctional movie crew films an adaptation of John Webster's peculiar “The Duchess of Malfi” (the strangely involving “Hotel”).

Now comes Figgis' “Cold Creek Manor,” a rather straightforward and mostly dull family-under-siege thriller with mass audiences in mind.

It's got a big, old house that's falling apart with neglect. Floors that creak ever so slightly at night. A mom and pop (Sharon Stone and Dennis Quaid) with lingering issues who've become the new owners. A couple of occasionally cranky kids. And, what will come as no surprise, an apparently docile dude arriving on the scene fresh from prison (Stephen Dorff) with his own deep, dark, possibly volcanic past.

Somebody cue the lightning and thunder.

In many ways, this is the kind of movie Hollywood films in its sleep. It's twinged with requisite boo scares, void of deeply complicated twists and often haphazard with basic logic.

There is a decent sequence involving snakes (slithering snakes are always good in a movie like this) and, in the film's best moment, a segment where suspected bad guy Dorff turns the tables on daddy Quaid, pointedly questioning the new homeowner's motives.

Ultimately, what we have here is something not unlike “Cape Fear” — minus the cape and without most of the fear.

Quaid and Stone, who's returning to the big screen after a three-year absence, do well enough with the mostly full-speed-ahead roles they've been given. But the key is Dorff, who seems to be cropping up a lot in films as a kind of resident psycho (“Blade,” “Cecil B. DeMented”).

Unfortunately, he doesn't have the simmering intensity of, say, Robert Mitchum or Robert De Niro (the emotional firepowers in the original “Cape Fear” and its remake) to really pull off edgy violence.

Ultimately, what should have the heat of helter-skelter will more than likely end up doing no more than leave you slightly irritated and cold.