Ghost House, if you’re trying to find it on IMDB, is the 2014 movie 2 Bedroom 1 Bath. This is another case of a movie getting a new, more generic title for the local release, presumably so that people can immediately recognize it as a horror movie. Not that it matters, really, because if one is looking for a horror picture, Ghost House is terribly inadequate. The film’s production values fall well below what should expected from a wide release. Combine the shoddy production with a tired, at times misogynistic story, and you have just another waste of our theater space.
Kevin and Rachel Foster (Andrew W. Walker and Michelle Hicks) have just moved into a new apartment. They’re hoping to have kids, but they haven’t had much luck thus far. The fact that weird things keep happening in their new place adds to their stress. Kevin keeps having these strange, violent visions, and Rachel appears to be changing somehow. It appears that there is something evil living with them in their home, and it’s causing all manner of strange and violent occurrences around them.
It isn’t easy to suss out what exactly the film is going for. This appears to be just the story of a poor husband beset on all sides by crazy women who want to bring him down. His wife has stopped taking her medication, and has decided to rely on homeopathic methods to keep her pregnancy healthy. The midwife doesn’t seem to like him, and is his wife’s co-conspirator in pseudo-medicine. And then there’s the college student that seems to want to seduce him. Kevin’s only ally, naturally, is his male best friend.
One could call the movie misogynist, but that might be giving it too much credit. The film is too lazy and badly made to really have such a defined ideology. It makes an attempt at many of the most familiar horror movie clichés. In just one scene, it plays out the ghost-showing-up-in-the-bathroom-mirror trick no less than three times. Just doing that once is an indication of a lack of new ideas. Three times is a sign that creativity never factored into the production of this film.
The movie can’t hide its lack of resources. Most noticeable is the awful sound design. There’s a distinct buzz in many of the scenes, and a complete lack of audio continuity. A low budget picture may be forgiven for a lot, but it should at least make its best attempt at getting the most basic elements right. It also suffers from some really bad acting. Andrew W. Walker is too bland to be compelling, and Michelle Hicks uses her character’s mental instability as an excuse to ham it up badly.
Ghost House, on a very basic level, isn’t good enough to be screened publicly. Its production values are just plain awful. But because it is a horror movie, it is something that our local cinemas seem all too willing to screen. Something really ought to change here. Plenty of better local films struggle to find their way into cinemas, but almost any random foreign horror picture will invariably find a place among our screens. It has been consistent problem for years now, and it continues to be a constant disappointment.
My Rating:
