Monday, October 17, 2011

Ghost Story


Returning home after the bizarre death of his twin brother, a man learns of the dark secret his father and his father's friends have been hiding for the last 50 years.

Milquetoast, I suppose is a good word for this one. It's not bad so much as kind of dull and unsurprising. I was very curious about it based on the description and the cast (including an elderly Fred Astaire and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), but it's story (based on a Peter Straub novel) is a bunch of sub-Stephen King cliches involving small town life, the supernatural, hidden secrets, etc. I guess I'm getting in to some SPOILERS here, but I think it's pretty clear within 5 minutes that 1) There is a ghost and 2) the old men are responsible for her death. Yet the movie teases this out slowly, over two hours, as if there is some sort of mystery. We are even treated to an extended flashback (seemed a good 20 or 30 minutes) late in the film to finally "explain" everything, and of course it's just a bunch of information we already inferred earlier in the film. There is no mystery, it's exactly the same story as every other ghost story, only longer and slower.

Grade: C

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