Aftermath of the opening bloodbath |
All the usual tricks are out in force in this one: the
haunted house; the freaky kid; the terrorised in bed dreams; the crawling,
decayed ghost hands on protagonist’s faces; the weird middle-aged neighbour who
is hiding something; and the creepy shaman grandmother in a mental institute
who knows the truth about the demon.
And that’s pretty much all this is, an excuse to go through the motions
but with some very attractive leads and fancy locations.
Sleepy dream scenes |
The most tedious problem with the film is that there are no
less than seven instances of the sisters dreaming about the child, with a
bloodied demon face, doing horrible things to them, including cutting off their
feet and stabbing out their eyes, which mostly take place in bed. Isn’t it obvious to the filmmakers that,
aside from how silly and bad for the narrative this repetitious device is, each
new version on the theme will dilute the potency of the scares? My eyeballs were doing loop-the-loops
by the third or fourth of these sequences. Such unimaginative filmmaking, surely they could figure out
another way to insert scares and violent imagery.
Freaky kid, yawn |
For the most part the film is well shot and the production
design and locations look great but the real problem seems to be the editing. A lot is badly or not explained and this
could be the result of scenes that didn’t work that were cut out, or it could
have been that it did not occur to the filmmakers that certain things needed
explanation. This is why you have
reshoots! Maybe they didn’t have
the money, or worse they didn’t care.
The little splices of violent imagery, another staple of the genre, were
poorly executed as well. It’s all
about timing and Ghastly is very uneven.
Homicide detective my foot |
For a film that takes pains in its aesthetics and goes so
far as to reference revered horror classics such as Psycho (1960) and The
Shining (1980), Ghastly has nothing original to say or show us. Blood is spilt, some skin is flashed, shamanism
is thrown in, even pedophilia is alluded to for good measure, but all we’re
left with is a series of discordant elements and disconnected scenes, though at
77 minutes, at least it’s mercifully short.
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