by LORRAINE CARPENTER

"Dance with me!"

It reads like an innocuous little snippet of dialogue, but it's one that elicits vivid memories in anyone who's seen David Lynch's classic early '90s TV series Twin Peaks. Ray Wise played Leland Palmer, the father of the fictional small town's murdered prom queen Laura, the man whose loud breakdowns and fits of compulsive dancing were so exquisitely sad, creepy and comic. It became one of the show's most intense and disturbing roles, reprised in Lynch's 1992 film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and to this day, Wise is greeted by the show's fans on streets all over the world.

"It's funny, I was shooting a film in Romania last year and it seems like everyone in that country knows Leland Palmer," says Wise, happy to address what he calls one of his most satisfying roles. "For better or worse, I have a very memorable face."

In recent years, Wise has scored stacks of TV and films parts, and now he's pencilled in a trip to Montreal for Fantasia's premieres of his two new horror films, Dead End and Jeepers Creepers 2. Throughout his career, which developed in the '70s and '80s on soaps like Days of Our Lives and Dallas and in movies like Cat People and RoboCop, Wise has played the responsible (or would-be responsible) type - doctors, politicians, colonels and, of course, fathers.

In Dead End, he's Frank Harrington, a dad driving his wife, two teens and daughter's boyfriend to grandma's house for Christmas, but when he veers from his usual route, the family lands on a particularly macabre stretch of road, a real "lost highway." Beyond its ample chills, what's striking about Dead End is how odd and flawed the characters are and how its French writer/directors Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa capture the American family dynamic while dodging American horror clichés.

"The script was very well written, with all its strange little twists and turns, and it made us seem very real as a family," says Wise, praising the rest of the film's ensemble cast. "Great care was taken to play it as a family story rather than a typical horror film and we really had that familial chemistry right away."

In Jeepers Creepers 2, Wise plays another dynamo dad, a farmer bent on killing the winged demon "creeper" (Jonathan Breck) that's terrorizing a busload of basketball players, cheerleaders and coaches on a nearby highway. Made with double the budget of its 2001 predecessor, also written and directed by Victor Salva, the sequel's shocking make-up, effects, set design, and a reportedly excellent performance from Breck made for a truly terrifying set.

"He's an extraordinary looking creeper, I'll tell ya," says Wise. "What the audience sees, we had right in front of our eyes, and with the atmosphere they created, especially shooting at night, feeling scared was the easy part."

As an actor, Wise is pleased playing the kind of complex, slightly twisted personality associated with his best known role, and with two teenage kids of his own, he's equally down with being typecast as Dad. Dancing is nice too, but he won't insist.

Ray Wise introduces Dead End on Saturday, August 2, 9:55pm (also showing on Monday, August 4, 9:30pm) and Jeepers Creepers 2 on Friday, August 8, 9:30pm

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