Ghost Team (2016) - Movie Review
What do you get when you take an amazing group of actors, give them a threadbare script, and then provide subpar direction?
A truly terrible film experience.
Surprised?
Let’s discuss…
This is one of those movies that makes me truly consider giving up on watching film in general. I know you’ve had a viewing experience similar. A movie that has a good cast, a decent trailer, what could go wrong? The answer is just about everything.
but before I delve into my depressing monologue…
Ghost Team is a 2016 horror / comedy brought to us by writer/director Oliver Irving and writer Peter Warren. Don’t worry, no one knows who they are either. This a team of writers with credits you can count on one hand and an average IMDB rating of less than 5 out of 10 stars.
Yeah, we’re not talking Goldman and Hill here.
How in the hell these guys got something greenlit and with such a quality genre cast? It blows my mind.
The film focuses on Louis, the owner of a small town printing shop who’s in a rut. His life hasn’t got the way he wants and he repeats the same boring cycle every day and night, ending with his nightly viewing of the T.V. show Ghost Getters. When he finds his best friend Stan has been living in his car, he takes him in as a roommate. Seeing that Stan is at rock bottom due to his belief that his runaway bride was in fact abducted by aliens, Louis vows to do something great. When Ghost Getters advertises a contest with a prize of joining the team, Louis decides its time to act. So, they quickly gather up a group of losers to investigate a local barn that’s supposedly haunted. What they find within those walls is nothing like they expected. Will they uncover true proof of the paranormal, or will they join the other phantoms in the Ghost Team.
This movie is a failure on every level.
It has sluggish pacing, poor character development and dialogue that feels like it was almost entirely improvised.
Improvised dialogue can work when you have the right performers with chemistry. Look at Christopher Guest’s award winning list of films for examples.
This is not one of those films.
There are bits that are so unfunny and forced that are then repeated later in the film as if they were hilarious, but all they induced was a groan.
It’s shocking because you’ve got a great cast of Justin Long, John Heder, Amy Sadaris, Melonie Diaz, and David Krumholtz—but all of them are wasted.
They somehow make John Heder and David Krumholtz completely unlikable. These two guys have made their careers on being likable losers, and yet they are both so blandly dense that it feels forced and makes them a non-factor as the audience surrogates.
This brings to mind one of the worst films I’ve ever reviewed on this website, Suburban Gothic—which also had an incredible genre cast, but failed on every single box on the checklist.
It’s frustrating, because they are tiny moments that really work and the movie could have been a really cool take on Die Hard in a haunted house, but none of the good threads are followed. Instead what we get is a film with 0 stakes, poor chemistry, and a rushed story where things just happen.
When the security appears and beats everyone up—it makes no sense. He was kidnapped with the others and tied up, he’s never shown or even hinted at being on the loose. And yet, he gets this heroic moment that even the less discerning folks around me exclaim, “What the hell?”
When the laymen are calling bullshit on your movie, you know you’re in a bad spot.
If you decide you want to waste an hour or two of your life, Ghost Team is currently streaming exclusively on HULU.
