ghosts | Geekscape

Horror Movie Night – Episode 28: House (1986)

by SaintmortJanuary 22, 2016

We hope your full metal jacket is polished and ready, because this week, we dive into the stupidest-looking jungle behind our dead aunt’s pool to discuss 1986’s HOUSE! There are used Hellraiser props, flying garden tools, babysitting hijinks and a couple dudes with questionable employment decisions to talk about. Believe it or not, it’s another episode of Horror Movie Night!

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Do you have a movie suggestion for us or just want to tell us stories about your experiences with the movies we’ve watched? Send them to us at HMNPodcast@gmail.com

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Horror Movie Night – Episode 17: Poltergeist 3

by SaintmortOctober 24, 2015

If you haven’t seen Poltergeist 3 yet, prepare to get carol anne’d. We took one for the team and discussed this steaming pile of carol anne, which led to much carol anneing by all parties involved. The in-camera effects were cool, but can they save this movie from an icy carol anne? Join us for another carol anne and find out on Horror Movie Night!

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Horror Movie Night – Episode 7: Odd Thomas

by SaintmortAugust 15, 2015

This week’s discussion is Odd Thomas, which brings us to ponder second-rate horror novelists, nu-metal tattoos and ghost sex. Matt has never hated a pick this much, while Adam and Scott just like to overtalk each other. There are more tangents than Bodachs in Odd’s town, so get your ice cream ready for another installment of Horror Movie Night!

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E3 2013: Geekscape Games Previews ‘Call of Duty: Ghosts’

by Josh JacksonJune 16, 2013

When Call of Duty: Ghosts was previewed at the Xbox One conference, the aftermath felt like meme central. But between fish AI, “Collar Duty” jokes and lots of love for dogs, there was actually a game in there somewhere. Aside from the usual military shooter game play, the conference promised a weakened America, a new cast of characters and a much more desperate setting. These were all of the qualities I was keeping an eye out for when I stepped into Activision’s Ghosts presentation, and I was happy to walk out with a few surprises.

Ghosts will be the story of two brothers who are recruited by an elite squad of soldiers that tackle missions to protect a crippled United States. Traveling all around the world to locations such as Venezuela, The Caribbean and the deep, dark recesses of San Diego, each location was heavy on action. One mission had the Ghosts repelling down a building while picking off security forces on the way down. Another had them swimming underwater and blowing up a submarine with a torpedo launcher. All of this is made so much better by an obviously improved AI, so let’s hope the days of your team mates standing around looking into the distance while you get pumped full of led are long gone.

But who cares about the human partners! This game is all about Riley, the service dog that stole the show at the game’s reveal. What seemed like a simple squad member turns out to be so much more. In a dog focused stage, the main characters were able to give voice commands to their pet for various tactical functions. What’s even better is the game showed players taking direct control of Riley as he maps out paths, checks to make sure corners are safe with his back mounted camera and can even stealth take down enemy soldiers. Once the coast is clear, control comes back to the boring old humans to shoot stuff up. BUT… Riley was also seen being sent into rooms to ambush enemies and trigger breaches. On these sections alone, I’m more than excited to bury terrorists with an actual dog.

This is all framed with an overhauled graphics engine, including displacement mapping which makes terrain look even more realistic. New weapons include an underwater machine gun that’s based on real military tech, and more new guns are sure to follow. Multiplayer wasn’t shown in this demo, but as long as Call of Duty is in the title, you can expect plenty of multikills, upgrades and airstrikes when you take the fight online.

All in all, Ghosts seems like overhauling the story, the settings and adding a dog of all things might be the next step in the evolution of the series. I know that nothing I write will help or hinder this game’s ability to sell tens of millions of copies, but I’m more excited for Ghosts than I’ve been for a COD game in a long, long time.

Call of Duty: Ghosts is coming to the PS4, Xbox One, Wii U, Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC in November.

Geekscape Movie Reviews: ‘The Possession’

by Derek KraneveldtSeptember 3, 2012

With the summer movie season drawing to a close, fewer and fewer titles are released each week, and I’m running out of things to watch. The only movie opening in my city this week was the Sam Raimi produced The Possession.

Just returning from the film, I’m still pretty torn on exactly how I felt about it. When The Possession works, it really works, providing as much scary, disturbing imagery as you can handle, and in a very believable setting. When it doesn’t work however, it really doesn’t work, and pulls you right out of the world it’s so carefully trying to build.

The Possession opens well enough. We see an old woman scared out of her mind, the object of her fear a mysterious box on her mantle, which appears to be whispering to her. She escapes to the kitchen, and returns with a hammer, on a mission to break the box. She lifts the hammer above her head, but before she can strike, she freezes and falls to the ground. She writhes and seizes in disturbing, unnatural ways (think Regan MacNeil from The Exorcist) while the music and sound effects grow and grow in intensity before the woman simply stops moving.

This scene was an excellent and effective start to the film. We get an idea of the power of this malevolent being who either really dislikes old women, or simply wants something else entirely. We’re also introduced to one of the highlights of the film: its excellent sound direction. The score and sound design really add to the experience here, and help to make already intense situations overwhelmingly so.

Enter our main characters in the film, the Brenek family (or what used to be the Brenek family). The couple is just divorced. The family is confused and broken, with the kids moving in between homes as the mother and father try to rebuild their lives.

I find that it’s with the family story that The Possession really shines. After a fast opening, the horror aspects of the movie tend to move rather slowly. Much of the time, the film feels like an intense family drama more than a horror flick, and though it isn’t at all what I signed up for, for some reason I’m okay with that. The family dialogue is well written and interesting, and serves well to get you caring about these characters before shattering your hopes for them.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Watchmen, Grey’s Anatomy) gives a fantastic performance as Clyde Brenek. He’s a father with nothing left but his kids and his job, and he gives both the best that he can. He handles the many emotions of the film extremely well, going from happiness to worry, sheer terror to heartbreak, and everything in between. He’s great, and extremely believable throughout, even when the movie starts pushing to extremes.

Natasha Calis also gives a quality performance as Em Brenek, Clyde’s daughter. She starts the film as a freaking adorable little girl before becoming the subject of the box’s desires.

Em becomes smitten with the box at a garage sale run by the old woman’s son (one could say it spoke to her, pun intended). We get one more glimpse of the old woman as the Breneks leave, appearing to be on her deathbed, screaming for her to leave the box alone.

I mentioned before that the actual horror elements of the film are rather slow. We get a bit of box whispering here and there as Em seems to become less and less connected with herself and her family, at one point stating “I don’t feel like myself”. Em’s strange behavior is typically attributed to the recent tough times the family has been going through, and not much else is thought about it.

It seems like it’s the actually in the scenes that involve the box that I find The Possession works the least. We see it open itself and whisper to Em a few times as she sleeps, but nothing much comes of it (obviously it’s actually the being inside that is speaking to her, but it looks like a freaking talking box and it seems silly). She brings the box to school and ends up beating up a kid who tries to touch it. The scene tries to be extremely intense but I found myself laughing at the absurdity of it instead.

The film runs 92 minutes, and while Em is disturbed for much of it, the actual possession doesn’t occur until over 60 minutes in. When a movie is titled The Possession, you really expect the actual possession bit to take up a larger chunk of it. Instead, when the actual event does happen, we’re so far into the film that it has to quickly jump to a resolution just so we can see the whole story. The film either needed to be longer, or simply get to the point quicker to avoid the abruptness of the ending.

When the demon finally enters Em, it really doesn’t seem like it wants to do much until they try and get it out of her. Really, it just seems to turn her into a bitch more than anything. If that’s the case, most of the girls I went to high school with had this box in their lockers.

It doesn’t help much when we get a generic scene of Jeffrey Clyde visiting a possession expert, who essentially tells him everything about the box, including what’s in it, where it came from, when it was made, and what he needs to do to fix things. This was definitely the weakest scene for me. It’s only purpose was to reveal everything to us that would have been better left as a mystery. Mystery’s are good! We don’t need to know everything about the being to know it’s not good. It really destroyed any sense of mystery that the film had built. Thanks for explaining the entire film, pal. Now, if only Joseph Gordon Levitt’s character from Inception had played the expert…

There’s one last bright spot in the film though. The exorcism scene works really well. Set in a very atmospheric hospital basement (for privacy’s sake, and since Em was already in the hospital anyways). The scene is creepy as hell largely due to the atmosphere (dim lighting, dirty and dank looking, hard surfaces making sound echo). This becomes especially true when Em breaks free, and Clyde chases her into the hospital morgue. This scene was extremely tense, suspenseful, and uncomfortable for seemingly everyone in the cinema: strobe lights and laughing creepy children make for a scary time. This isn’t anything that we haven’t seen in a lot of horror film’s before but The Possession manages to do these scenes very, very well.

Now for some SPOILERS.

Eventually, Em is caught, and the demon is returned to it’s prison. Upon the resolve of Em’s possession, everything seems back to normal much too quickly. This event was (cheesily enough), just what the Brenek family needed to bring it back together. Clyde looks happy again, and the very morning after they all could have lost their lives, they began joking about it.

The film closes however, with a car accident involving the vehicle containing the box with the demon. We hear the whispering again just before the credits roll. Looks like it didn’t get what it wanted, and is already trying to break free, already ready to try once more.

Again, when The Possession works, it works well. Tense scenes are very tense, atmospheric, and creepy. The family has great onscreen chemistry and their conversations definitely made you really care and want things to work out for them. As much as I liked this stuff, I came to The Possession to see a possession, and instead mostly watched a family drama where one of the characters is a creepy whispering box.

It was a good effort. The film looked great, and had a lot of strong cinematography on top of the great sound direction I mentioned before.

The Possession wasn’t overly memorable, but being that its only horror competition right now is the abysmal in every way imaginable “The Apparition”, I’m sure its box office numbers will be just fine.

3/5

This Geek in Netflix: The Legend of Lucy Keyes

by AllisonnnnnJuly 18, 2012

Kids, you’re going to have to forgive me for this review, as I’m still coming down off the high of Comic-Con. And by “high”, I mean total lack of sleep.

“I’m done with your imaginary friend horseshit, Lucy.”

While digging through the horde of Netflix Instant movies, I discovered The Legend of Lucy Keyes, which had a fairly decent rating from its users and claimed to be about the haunting of a farm or some such nonsense. What occurred, however, I would not exactly call a “haunting” as much as random vaguely spooky occurrences that really didn’t impact anyone among the living in any significant way.

It started off promising with my preferred generic opener: scene setters placed alongside really nondescript music. Here’s a farmhouse. Oh, here’s another farmhouse. Here’s some leaves. Here’s a cemetery. Here’s a quaint town. OH, FUCK, IT’S A MOVING VAN ATTACHED TO A STATION WAGON/MINI-VAN/OTHER FAMILY-ORIENTED VEHICLE.

I like the classic clichédness of it all, as it reminds me of 70s horror films (i.e. a favorite of mine, Burnt Offerings) and it seems like it might have some promise at this point. In pursuit of contract that would enable him to build eight windmills on some countryside acreage, Guy Cooley (Justin Theroux) moves his wife (Julie Delpy, who I know from a brief period in my life where all I would watch was Disney’s Three Musketeers—don’t judge) and their two little girls move to an old farm deep in the middle of nowhere.

What I will give this movie points for is actually attempting to try to establish the characters before launching into the… hrm. It’s not exactly horror, as there isn’t anything really resembling a scary moment. Huh. Wait, I know! Launching into the brief interactions with the not-so-recently deceased who don’t really seem all too unpleasant, honestly. Sure, they’re a little loud at night and cause flashbacks, but other than that… very few unpleasant side effects.

Stays up at night wishing he had got the Comic-Con Derpy pony.

However, when you bring in the crazy neighbor, Judd Jonas (Mark Boone Junior – Robert Munson from Sons of Anarchy), and his Cruella deVille-like cousin, Samantha Porter, (Brooke Adams), suddenly ghosts aren’t needed for the horror factor anymore, as Porter does her best to keep the audience’s something-ain’t-right-here-sense tingling.

This film felt lacking for me. Delpy was the workhorse of this film, pulling it with all her might (and a sexy accent), and Theroux definitely pitched in at times, but the overall effect was still somewhat lacking. For a little over an hour and a half, I kept waiting for this movie to hit its stride and it never really did—all the pieces were there, they just weren’t assembled quite properly.

This Geek in Netflix: House of Voices

by AllisonnnnnJune 20, 2012

In 2010, I watched a Spanish horror film called The Orphanage. That movie scared the shit out of me in a way that hadn’t happened since I was little and was pressured into watching one of the Chuckie movies with my father who proceeded to spend the next several months trying to create exciting new ways to terrify me with antique dolls.

Clearly the love-child of Geena Davis and Natalie Portman.

The Orphanage was released in 2007, three years after the French-Romanian horror film House of Voices (original title: Saint Ange) debuted. I bring the former up as House of Voices is, essentially, its mellow French counterpart.

No, not in its plot or atmosphere, but in the motifs that cycle through the two films.

House of Voices revolves around the happenings at Saint Ange, an orphanage in the French Alps in 1958, and the newly hired cleaning woman, Anna (Virginie Ledoyne – Francoise from The Beach). Anna arrives to Saint Ange during a mass exodus—the orphanage is shutting down as the children are being shuffled away having all been miraculously placed with foster families. It is Anna’s job to help put the building back in order.

No, don’t worry, this isn’t some sort of oddly arousing BDSM flick of the sexy scullery maid working herself to the bone while some disturbing landlord looks on and strokes his… chin. Anna has help in the forms of the haunted Judith (Lou Doillon) and the stout cook, Ilinca (Dorina Lazar). The trio are left quite alone as they scour the kitchen, dry the laundry, and play dress up.

This solitude is good for Anna, as we quickly discover that she is pregnant and very much against this whole state of child-bearing and wants to desperately pretend that her rapidly expanding stomach is just a case of extreme gas.

[Insert the lyrics to every Madonna song ever here.]

During her moody explorations, Anna begins hearing noises and seeing children scurrying about the deserted hallways of Saint Ange. Convinced that something is up, especially after being warned by a departing orphan to avoid the ugly children (really, don’t we do that naturally?), Anna starts digging into the history of orphanage, with the trusty Judith by her side.

This film was an interesting contrast of elements. Visually, it was full and beautiful without being overly lush, save for those brief transitions into “ghost areas” while being heavily contrasted against a very small amount of dialogue, almost enough so that the story could become easily lost if a single sentence was missed or misheard. This minimalist take on the dialogue removed a lot of the traditional verbal exposition and explanation, leaving the movie wide open to interpretation.

The character of Anna swung between being sympathetic and loathsome, causing me to alternate between cheering for her and wanting to punch her whining face, which is a fairly conflicted stance to take on a serious horror movie and an odd choice of presentation indeed.

In the end, this was more of a ghost story with heavy psychological elements than it was a horror movie, causing the tale to be of a more mellow form than that of The Orphanage, but even with its gradually accelerating pace it certainly never strayed—at least for me— into the territory of the boring.

If you’re looking for a movie to slowly unfold before you with a haunting echo, queue up House of Voices on Netflix Instant. If you’re looking to be scared shitless and possibly never sleep again, watch The Orphanage and be prepared to cry yourself to sleep that night.

This Geek in Netflix: It’s My Party and I’ll Die if I Want to

by AllisonnnnnApril 25, 2012

At 1AM on Monday night, I was feeling kinda loopy. You know, that pleasant tired when one starts hallucinating that there might be clowns in one’s pocket. Instead of doing what any normal person would do and curl up in sweet unconscious oblivion, I decided to watch a movie on Netflix.

After sorting through various obvious rejects (The Exorcist?? What a lame name—pass.), I decided on a swell looking flick called It’s My Party and I’ll Die if I Want to. How could I go wrong?

Almost exactly 24 hours later, I’m not quite feeling equally loopy, but I’m definitely getting there. So here’s some lazy reporting. This low-budget film, shot for less than $20K per the production company’s website, has won awards at the Full Moon Film Festival (not associated with Full Moon Features), the Action on Film International Film Festival, the Dark Carnival Film Festival… okay, I’m stopping there. This is boring me as I write it. That’s talent.

The movie was made. The movie was released. The movie won some awards. The movie had some unknown (but surprisingly decent) actresses in it, one of which is also in a movie called Fetish Dolls Die Laughing, which appears to be about how the “tickle monster” is real and turning women into perverted tickle fetishists. This is almost the most fantastic thing I’ve heard all week.

Don’t ask what the most fantastic thing is. Trust me.

According to legend—or at least the beginning of this film—in 1930, Jacob Burkitt locked up his family in their “manor” and, in typical batshit fashion, went on a murderous rampage, killing his wife and their six children. Since that time, no one has been able to occupy the “manor” (it’s a goddamned house) for more than a few months and several more deaths have occurred within its walls.

Fast-forward to present day. It’s Halloween—like it tends to be in horror movies—in some non-descript Midwest town. While Sara, an over-achieving redhead, is out over-achieving and being generally sexless in nature, her friends are putting the finishing touches on her surprise birthday party… at the haunted Burkitt house.

Happy birthday, all of your friends are dead!

Sara, you see, is a big horror movie and Halloween fan. Maybe she’s simply just one of those quirky girls that loves the dark and macabre. Maybe she’s self-obsessed and wants to celebrate her birthday year round because she’s a soulless redhead. We’ll never know.

As her friends slowly trickle into the house to do pre-party hijinks, they start dying off. And by dying, I mean they’re being gruesomely murdered by the ghosts of Jacob Burkitt and his family. Just after the token Asian chick, Jill, gets her heart ripped out (not in that lame metaphor way), Sara receives her last minute party invite and pulls out a costume she “happened to have on hand”.

What is she for Halloween? Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. Fuck. Yes.

Rushing over to her party, Sara soon finds that she’s got more in store for her than a few presents and some GHB.

Gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid?! Count us in!

This movie was incredibly low-budget. Film quality hearkens back to the 70s—even though it was supposedly shot digitally. Lighting was abysmal. The sets were severely limited and the “manor” was laughably unmanor-like.

However, I actually enjoyed it. The abysmal lighting added a realistic edge to particular scenes, addressing a constant mini-frustration I have with horror movies—the sudden disconnect from characters when we can see more than they can. This movie managed to make me jump a few times, even with clichéd and should-have-expected-that maneuvers, and the acting was, for the most part, good. I mean, the actress who plays Sara isn’t Nicholas Cage or anything, but she’s fine.

Primary complaints? Complaint, really. But it’s going to be an angry one. The goddamned soundtrack. Jesus would weep at this soundtrack, and then crucify himself in what would be a spectacularly failed attempt to redeem the movie.

Imagine this: you’re a very white-washed teen in rural U.S.A. You wear pink jeans and may never have had a decent hair cut in your entire life. Your friends are steps away from running the glee club. What’s your soundtrack? Angry rap? Oh, of course. This makes so much sense to just insert at every possible moment of character introduction to really give you a feel for the movie.

Other than that blip in an otherwise enjoyable film, it was fun. While in the realm of the standard Tales From the Crypt feeling (with a nod to Trick ‘r’ Treat with graphic novel-style transitions), it managed to exceed my expectations and actually provide decent entertainment where the only time I felt like smashing my laptop closed was when the torturous soundtrack flared up.

Check it out on Netflix on Demand if you want a short horror film to temporarily call your own. There’s tits and even a body double in a “goddamn, the director really wishes this was porn” shower scene.

DVD Review: The Dead Want Women

by AllisonnnnnApril 23, 2012

Full Moon Features has moved from their usual quirky possessed toy movies and traveled into the realm of the classic ghost story with their latest feature, The Dead Want Women.

Based on a story by horror legend, Charles Band, The Dead Want Women begins at the tragic unraveling of the siren of the silver screen, Rose Pettigrew (Jean Louise O’Sullivan) in 1920s Hollywood.

While hosting a party in celebration of her latest silent film, Rose leaves her mansion and slips off to a secret grotto with her three gentlemen companions: the Abbott-influenced Tubby (Nihilist Gelo), the lecherous horror icon Eric Burke (Robert Zachar), and the cowboy Sonny Barnes (Eric Robertson). While engaging in a mild orgy, Rose is interrupted from her delights by her agent, Norman (Circus-Szalewski), and hesitatingly informed that, because of the failure of the very film they are celebrating and the sudden popularity of the “talkie”, the studio has decided not to renew her contract.

After putting on a very distraught performance and receiving oaths of eternal devotion from her three companions, Rose surprises the group by grabbing one of Sonny’s guns and shooting not just the three gentlemen, but also one of the orgy participants. When she goes to add herself to the body count, she learns she’s out of bullets and instead slits her own throat with one of Tubby’s knives.

Moving into the present day, realtors Danni (Ariana Madix) and Reese (Jessica Morris) arrive to the Pettigrew mansion on a mission to clean before meeting to complete a sale with a mysterious buyer. After an afternoon of scrubbing and no wealthy gentleman caller, Danni and Reese break open a bottle of wine a drink themselves into pleasant unconsciousness.

When they wake, their adventure begins. From waterfalls turning themselves on to lustful specters, Danni and Reese have their hands full trying to escape the grounds of the Pettigrew mansion with not just their lives intact, but also their virtue.

Then things start to get really weird.

This movie is not what you’d expect from a typical Full Moon movie—if there is such a thing as a typical Full Moon movie. It echoes back to the classic Tales from the Crypt story, but with a modern twist… and a longer format. The Dead Want Women allows the plot to build and introduces us to the characters long enough to get to know them before they’re keeling over or running through dark hallways screeching at top volume.

From the sound track to using Silent Era Hollywood as a setting, Full Moon did something different with this movie, experimented in a new direction and the results are surprisingly entertaining. You can check it out yourself on May 1^st, 2012 at Full Moon Direct or at your local Red Box.

Geekscape Movie Reviews: Intruders

by AllisonnnnnMarch 26, 2012

I have a thing for fairy tales, those simplisitic little stories that offer something different up each time I read them. I also have a thing for horror movies, where things don’t always end up happily ever after.

Few movies can effectively combine both the scare and feel of horror and the simplistic, constantly changing perception of fairy tales, but Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (28 Weeks Later) mangages to blend together those traits in his latest film, Intruders, with the creation of the monster, Hollow Face.

Hollow Face is a creature without a face that roams the streets at night looking for a child’s face to steal so he can be loved– for who could love a beast without a face?

Intruders is the tale of two children who are both stalked by this monster in his attempt to possess a face. We are fist introduced to Hollow Face in a nightmare, when he attacks Juan (Izan Corchero) and his mother (Pilar Lopez de Ayala) in their apartment in Spain. Just when we think things are going to reach a climax, Juan wakes, screaming for his mother.

But Hollow Face isn’t simply consigned to the dream world. Twelve-year-old Mia (Ella Purnel) and her father (Clive Owen) become physically endangered when the pre-teen begins to near-compulsively attempt to write the ending of a scary story she found hidden in the hollow of a tree. By reading this story and then attempting to finish it herself, she wakes Hollow Face and allows him access to her home, where he hides in her closet waiting for the right time to strike.

As she and her father attempt to do battle with the physical threat of Hollow Face, Mia’s mother (Carice van Houten) is skeptical of the danger and forces Mia away from the only person who not only believes her stories of Hollow Face, but will try to protect her from the creature.

While this battle goes on, Juan’s mother attempts to deal with what she seems to think is a possession and, as Juan’s nightmares begin to cross over into the real world, alternatively seeks out religious comfort and shuns it– which does little to address the danger Juan is in.

The story was fascinating, the overlapping tales of the two tormented children and how their respective parents attempted to deal with their offspring’s fears. The use of dark shadows in corners and Mia’s haunted closet triggered childhood memories of huddling under my blankets after reading a particularly scary story, fearfully eyeing my closet.

However, even with the characters in the story that most all of us can identify with– as either terrified children or parents dealing with that horror, and even with the fascinating story, parts of the movie’s internal logic began to fall apart at the end, leaving questions not just unanswered but unable to be answered within the system the movie put forth.

If you are one of those people that leaves theaters and rigorously complains that the movie did not make sense, that factors x, y, and z did not add up on a logical level, and you place the majority of the movie’s value on its logical consistency, this may not be the movie for you.

However, if you are able to suspend disbelief, as we are asked to do so often when dealing with fairy tales and fantasy stories, if you do not need a constant form of logical support to enjoy something as a piece of film, I highly suggest taking the time to go down to your local theater to view the tale of Hollow Face.

To read an interview with director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo on the thoughts behind this film, please click here.

Intruders releases in theaters on March 30th, 2012.

This Geek in Netflix: Ghosts of Goldfield

by AllisonnnnnMarch 6, 2012

Rarely do I get stir-crazy and bored while watching horror movies. There’s nearly always something redemptive about them, whether it be a great scene (Ghost Ship, I’m looking at you), a great soundtrack, or hysterically bad acting. Truly, I usually can find something to latch onto.

2007’s Ghosts of Goldfield is one of the few films that I gave up on trying to enjoy and instead embraced the boredom that comes with those few movies that aren’t good,but aren’t laughably shitty either.

This is just too easy. I'd feel guilty about taking advantage.

The acting wasn’t good, even though there’s a definite spread of talent. Our lead actress, Marnette Patterson, is a constant television actress with the standard extra roles on the even more standard host of shows. Our cliched “sexy chick”, Mandy Amano (who is quite attractive, I will say), has been in minor roles in movies such things as Coyote Ugly (one of my guilty pleasures) and Crank: High Voltage (less a guilty pleasure and more of a source of masturbation material). Really, though, the only actor of note (and the only one that can actually act) is Kellan Lutz.

You know, Kellan Lutz. Emmett Cullen from the Twilight series. Poseidon from Immortals. Kellan Lutz. Weird sorta blip there. Speaking of blips, let’s just go into the beginning of the movie summary with an awkward transition. Yay!

Kellan Lutz, god of wetness, god of moisture, and things that are wet.

The scene is set: a desert drive in a white SUV overlaid with the opening credits and pictures of old ghost towns. We hear the chatter of inane kids in their early twenties regarding their road trip to a haunted motel, where I pull the gem:

“Today we’re headin’ up to the famous Goldfield Hotel to see if we can find us some real live ghosts.”

If poor phrasing was a sin, this guy would be dead already.

Also! We get to see the ghost, prompting the following mid-movie-watching note:

Didn’t you guys learn anything from Muoi: The Legend of a Potrait? Jesus. Stop revealing the goddamned end boss 50 seconds into the movie. Who do I need to call to make this stop happening? SOMEONE, GET GEORGE ROMERO ON THE PHONE, STAT.

As we get some degree of introduction to the characters, we learn that the blonde is a psychology major, working on her thesis which, as far as I can tell, has absolutely nothing to do with psychology. Brunette is a red shirt, working on her five-finger discount and mad faux-lesbian skills. She’ll be the first to die, just before Mr. English-Ain’t-Mah-First-Language gets taken out by a rogue piece of rusty pipe. There are also three guys, but they’re indistinguishable from each other until about forty-five minutes in.

The car ride continues until the blonde falls asleep in the fading light and we get to flash-forward to the scene where one of the guys, a hipster-looking douchebag, gets killed. So not only is the monster being revealed again, so is one of the deaths.

Of course, I could see hipsters being knifed in the skull all day and not get sick of it, so it’s not such a bad thing. God, I hope we see it like eight more times.

Blonde also hears, “Come back to me…” as she wakes, whispered by the ghost. When she comes to, she’s clutching her necklace.

I brightened this picture and upped the contrast just for *you*.

Okay, how many people want to bet that by the end of this movie, everyone is dead but the blonde, who is not killed by the ghost because the ghost is actually her grandmother or great-grandmother who died while looking for her baby (who was kidnapped or whatever) who ended up being perfectly fine and starting a family of her own? WHO WANTS TO LAY SOME MONEY ON THE LINE?!

I’m at the 3 minute, 15 second mark of this movie, and if this doesn’t work out like I predicted, I’m going to punish myself by eating a chocolate chip cookie. If it does work out, I’m eating a chocolate chip cookie *and* making a booty call. (Post-movie update: I might have been wrong, but the theme was there. I’m still making that call.)

Around sunset, the car dies while taking a shortcut to the hotel. Bad dialogue ensues about why the car broke down but, really, the car was probably just rebelling against the douchey-est haircut known to man that the driver was sporting. If he let someone cut it to something that contained lesser levels of douchery, the car would start again.

BRB, going completely out of my established character.

After much whining, they start walking to the hotel. I can’t even speak to the line of “We’ve been walking so long, it’s dark already,” when they started walking at goddamned sunset. Someone punch the goddamned brunette for me. Just reach through the goddamned screen and just pop her one.

During their night wanderings, they find an old cemetary. Good for them. Anyhow, the little cunty brunette decides she doesn’t wanna go into the cemetery and you can’t make her, waaaah. Until, of course, the whispering starts. “Bloooody finger, bloooooody finnggerrrr!”

Sorry. Was re-living my campfire story days.

“Where’s my baby? Where’s my baaaabyyyyyy?” followed by, “Closer, my darling, closer.” Which was followed by a coyote howl. OF COURSE IT WAS.

"This place lacks room service. I'm giving it three stars on Yelp."

The blonde experiences double-vision and a sudden sepia-toned flashback where we get to witness some godawful dancing and the reveal that one hundred (or whatever) years ago, the blonde used to be a waitress in the bar where the ghost worked (while alive, you nitwits).

When she comes out of it, the brunette is racing towards her and one of the idiots… er, men… is missing. Mike. Whichever one that one was.

He ends up popping out from behind a grave, scaring everyone, and then announcing repeatedly that he “got” them all. You know, being an idiotic horror movie stereotype.

So, death order as stands is:

1. Cunty brunette who needs a good punching
2. Mike (may or may not have English issues)
3. Idiot with English issues (may or may not be Mike)

After their brush with stupidity, the five kids head into the suddenly located ghost town to hopefully suddenly locate the hotel.

Hotel = suddenly located! \o/

Let’s take a moment to note that this is supposed to be a ghost town, you know, one of those California/Nevada/Arizona towns that was all hustle and bustle while people were working towards their Manifest Destiny or mining the shit out of the mountains and then dried up for a variety of reasons, generally in the 1920s.

So please ignore the goddamned stop sign in front of the hotel. Oh, and the open bar across the street from the hotel. You know, in the town that one of the less mentally disabled kids said had no vistors aside from the occasional tourist.

After awkward and vaguely illogical conversation with the bartender and his lone patron, the Scooby gang gets a key to the abandoned (and fully furnished and clean) hotel, with instructions not to go into room 109. (Because you know those instructions’ll be followed.)

The bartender explains that George Winfield, Elizabeth’s boss and sex-patron, killed poor Elizabeth in room 109. During this story, the bartender gets incredibly, oddly emotional about Elizabeth and then, when asked if he somehow knew her (kids can’t do math), he explains that he’s seen paintings of her and basically put all of his sex drive into pastels and turned into a total dead-chick-stalking creep.

I may have elaborated on that last part.

The look of concern you're seeing is them watching the final cut of this film.

After story time is over, the kids walk over to the hotel, where the blonde has another sepia-toned flashback where she sees Elizabeth receive the gift of a necklace (Whaaat? Like the necklace the blonde was playing with at the beginning of the film? SHOCKING.) from her beau “for the baby”.

Back in modern day, the cunty brunette steals the hotel desk’s bell while the idiot who likes to scare people scares people again and then busts out the alcohol.

It’s almost like they want to die.

The next hour of this movie is spent with them roaming around multiple locations cobbled together to represent a hotel that is mostly birthed from locations that were clearly not built in the early 1900s. From fire sprinklers to uniform gray carpeting to flouresent lights to modern plumbing, the hotel fails to provide any atmosphere except for the sad sort of desperate amusement one gets when visiting one of those truck stops/mini-casinos that dot the highways in Nevada.

Topless and inebriated-- just like I like them.

What are they doing while roaming? Fuck if I know. There seems to be an overarching plot… kinda. I mean, it’s mostly there. And then there’s all these little potential side plots that amount to nothing and then there’s just severe amounts of minor plot inconsistencies that make the whole thing rather shaky, and I’m not sure if I should blame those issues on the screenwriter or the editor.

In sum: Editing fail. Script fail. Character fail. Plot fail. Location fail. Fail fail. (Or would that be “success fail”? I just wanted to write “fail fail”. Seemed like a good idea.)

I don’t suggest queuing this up on your Netflix. It’s simply not worth it. I can’t even design a drinking game around this, other than “drink every time Kellan Lutz is hot”, which is a totally gimme.

Until next week, kids.

This Geek in Netflix: Death of a Ghost Hunter

by AllisonnnnnFebruary 21, 2012

I’ve been tapering off on my enjoyment of found footage videos. I was never that impressed with The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity 3 really fell flat. I’m over it, you know?

That bitching, fortunately, has little to do with the 2007 film, Death of a Ghost Hunter. I just felt like starting this article with a complaint. A second complaint? Why the hell is my neighbor’s fire alarm going off? Take out the damn battery already!

Death of a Ghost Hunter was this little movie made by another one of those incestuous bubbles of people that seem to form in the film business. This particular bubbly set circles around such titles as: The Frankenstein Syndrome, The Great American Snuff Film, and The Greatest American Snuff Film. (I think those last two might be related.)

I thought I'd open with a nice ass-shot. Because I'm tasteless.

The actors in it are unmentionable at the moment– no one that anyone would recognize unless they’re somehow obsessed with the great or the greatest american fictional snuff films, so instead I’m going to take this time to thank my neighbor for finally removing his smoke detector’s battery. Thank y– fuck. False alarm. (Har.)

Away from that high-pitched beeping and into the film, Death of a Ghost Hunter opens as being based on true events. The highly broken up opening crawl reads:

In 1982, Minister Joseph Masterson and his family were murdered inside their home.

(insert crazy footage here of slaughter involving a Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick)

“Ghost Hunting” is the process in which paranormal investigators use modern technology to obtain tangible evidence regarding the existence of life after death.

In 2002, renowned ghost hunter Carter Simms, was offered $5,000 to perform a paranormal investigation on the Masterson House.

Her investigation stands as the single most tragic paranormal inquiry in American history.

It ended with her death.

This film is based on the journal entries she made during her investigation.

When I first started watching this movie, I assumed that there was some basis of fact that inspired a weird story. That was quickly dashed when I saw the name “Carter Simms”. No one names their little girl “Carter Simms”. (Found-footage screenwriters take note: don’t do shit like this.)

Ghost Hunter Detective Alucard Phantom Carter Simms-Holmes.

During the whole textual introduction, we get to watch Ms. Simms drive out to Arizona, engage with one of the remaining Mastersons, all while doing the most unbelieveable, “I’m-reading-this-from-a-script”, voice-over I may have ever heard.

From the incredibly shoddy voice over, we learn that, after witnessing an unexplainable event, Seth Masterson has not only hired Carter to examine the house, but also has brought on a journalist and a video technician to record her experiences. Carter isn’t happy about the potential interference, but she accepts that he is the client and he is going to be
paying her a chunk of money for three days of work.

The next day, Carter goes into the house and begins to walk through the place. While exploring she (and us, of course) gets the crap scared out of her by the tactless and slightly nerdy video technician, Colin. Shortly after, sassy and street-wise Yvette shows up on the scene, waggling her finger. (Being sassy and street-wise means she’s going to die first, by the way.)

You would think, much like Carter did, that we’d have our whole crew for the movie by this point but, much like Carter, you’d be wrong. The waif-like Mary Young knocks on the door and introduces herself as the spiritual advocate for the Masterson family, there to stand guard on their reputation as good Christians.

This is the part where I’d pull out some sort of weapon and bean her in the skull simply for being creepy, but no one in the movie seems to have my epic foresight.

After (poorly acted) introductions are made, our four-person crew starts their sleep-over party with Carter “Mood-Killer” Simms recounting the details of the Masterson murders from the police report and uncomfortably segues into Colin recording Carter as she wanders around the house attempting to take temperature readings.

When they arrive in the master bedroom, where Mr. Masterson had his throat slit, the temperature suddenly drops and everyone panics and bolts back to Command Center (AKA: the dining room) where, eventually, one of the chairs moves (making everyone panic again).

Two more nights with increasing paranormal activity (har har) take place and result in the culmination of this movie… which I rather enjoyed.

Parts of this movie actually surprised me, as it strayed just far enough from the usual formulaic presentation that we’ve all gotten so used to. I will admit that, about ten minutes in, I was about to switch movies. I didn’t want to watch a bunch of poorly acted crap. But I stayed with it and, yes, while the acting occasionally knocked me out of the movie, I’m
glad I stuck around.

Do I think it could have been done better, with a bigger budget and better actors? Yes, of course it could– and it would have been amazing. But the people who helped put this movie together and, yes, after a very shaky start created something pretty damn neat.

I definitely suggest putting this movie in your Netflix Instant Queue for future scary-movie-night viewing– just be prepared to wade through the first ten minutes. Also, neighbor, thanks for finally taking care of your wailing smoke detector. I’m now less likely to make attempts on your life.