Two-Minute Movie Review: Pay the Ghost

I'm a Nicolas Cage fan, no two ways about it. I know that if I'm watching a movie with Nic Cage in it, I'll be at least mildly entertained. Consistency is a quality to be prized, depending on context; obviously, some things are consistently awful, like mayonnaise and root canals. Nic Cage is not like mayonnaise and root canals.

Pay the Ghost is a fun movie, imaginative and disturbing.  It was based off of a novella by Tim Lebbon, whom I've never read before but deserves great respect for being a successful writer. The film has one great strength that makes it worth watching and one titanic weakness that almost made me turn it off. I'm glad I didn't.

The strength is in the portrayal of how Mike (Nic Cage) and Kristen's (Sarah Wayne Callies) son Charlie goes missing.  You know what's going to happen, but it doesn't lessen the tension in the lead-up, the panic in the event, and the grief afterward.  As a parent, it becomes very easy to identify with the loss of a child: every missing or kidnapped child becomes your own, if only for a moment.  That part was very well done.  Callies always seems to take thankless, unlikable roles, like the doctor in Prison Break and Lori in The Walking Dead: it's not her performance that makes you dislike her, but the writing. This unlikability carries over in Pay the Ghost, where her character Kristen immediately blames Mike for losing the boy, and even later, in the aftermath, continues to hold him responsible.

And this is where the weakness comes in: a year later, after they've separated, both Mike and Kristen get intimations that Charlie is asking for their help, reaching out to them from some other place.  Later, when Kristen approaches Mike with news of her occult visitations with Charlie, Mike immediately and pathetically accepts her as if nothing had happened in the intervening year. No acknowledgment of Kristen's venomous words or behavior, and most importantly, no apology from Kristen. It threw me off, made me like both Mike and the movie a bit less.

The addition of a sexy German folklore professor played by Veronica Ferres and harried cop played by Lyriq Bent didn't do a lot for the film's plot or interest: both could have been fleshed out a little more.  Stephen McHattie had a great little cameo as a blind homeless man (a sentence that both amuses and depresses in equal measure).

Overall, though, I enjoyed the movie and recommend it. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Friday Links: Monsters in the Night, Vatican Exorcism Courses, and The Silence

All you've got to do is make it to the weekend.  Here's what happened during those days you hoped to fast-forward through to get to today:

• We learned about an exorcism course taught by the Vatican: "The tenth annual course on exorcism has gotten off to a bang in Rome, with a full house of 170 students eager to learn how to recognize and fight demonic possession.  Sponsored by the Vatican Congregation for the Clergy and organized by the Sacerdos Institute, the weeklong course titled “Exorcism and Prayer of Liberation” is taking place at the European University of Rome from April 13 to 18."
• Jim Mcleod himself reviewed Tim Lebbon's The Silence at Ginger Nuts of Horror: "And yet the  narrative isn’t even the bravest or strongest part of the book.  It is Lebbon’s characters that really make this book stand out.  In particular that of our heroine Ally.  You see Ally has been deaf ever since a car accident, living a a world without sound it is up to her to lead her family to safety.  Ally’s character could so have easily been a gimmick, however Lebbon has clearly got into the mind and soul of our heroine.  She is a believable character, flawed, and human this isn’t your all action hero."
• At Taliesin Meets the Vampires, Taliesin took a second look at The Tomb to determine if it was a vampire movie or not: "I remember watching this Michael Staininger directed film back in 2009 when it was released. I couldn’t remember too much about it however. I knew, of course, that it was loosely based on the Poe story Ligeia but couldn’t remember why I had thought, as I watched it, that the potentially vampiric story was not vamp."
• Nev Murray had an exciting announcement at his Confessions of a Reviewer!!
• John Kenneth Muir took on the 1975 film The Ultimate Warrior: "The film’s great virtue is its sense that mankind will endure. That fatalism can be outlived. The final scene -- set outside the confines of the de-humanized City -- promises a re-birth of hope, and an end to the fatalism that reduced man to selfish barbarian.  But of course, such catharsis can only arise after a particular brutal confrontation between Brynner and William Smith -- local warlord -- in a subway car."
• Sean Eaton presented us with his typically trenchant analysis at his invaluable R'lyeh Tribune: "[Clark Ashton Smith's] Monsters in the Night is an interesting blend of fantasy and science fiction.  Smith imagines a contemporary setting that includes werewolves and vampires as well as unspecified monsters of more recent creation.  He seems to imply that there are traditional monsters in the country side and “newfangled” ones in the cities—all of them equally lethal."
• Terrorphoria gave us some good news about horror on Blu-Ray.
• Here, I talked about the cartoons my son and I watch, discussed writing about grief, and celebrated the publication of my short story Hold On.

Illustration by Tom Sullivan for Call of Cthulhu's S. Petersen's Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters.