Pay the Ghost (2015)

Hey, it's almost the end of summer already!  It's been a hot one, around here.  No records or anything, but generally high 80's and low 90's.  Drought around here was so bad this year, Crickets didn't even start chirping til almost August.  But enough about the weather!  You guys want to know how I've been doing!  Well, I...  What?  You don't give a shit about me, you just want to know about the movie review?  Well, fine then!  Let's get to it.

Pay the Ghost (2015) starts out pretty well.  Nicholas Cage plays a college professor, who has mostly ignored his family in his quest to get tenure.  On Halloween, he finally finds out he's got it, and rushes home to take his son to a Halloween Carnival or something.  Only, the young son has been seeing things lately, things like a lot of very evil-looking vultures flying overhead, and some cloaked figure outside his window at night.  While at the Carnival with Professor Nick, the son mysteriously vanishes, and the professor can't find him...

First off, I'm not a fan of Nicholas Cage, but if you can ignore him, this movie starts out pretty good.  The vultures are pretty spooky-looking, and the cloaked figure outside the kid's window is vague enough to be anything at all.  I love that nobody else sees anything that the kid is seeing, but it seems like they might have, if they'd looked a little bit faster.  Almost like whatever the kid is seeing is totally real, and the adults are just missing it, somehow.  Then, the whole story behind the vultures/cloaked figure comes out, and frankly, I have no idea what the vultures have to do with the cloaked figure, but they're still cool.  I've seen vultures up close in real life, and honestly, I was a little creeped out, but I was at the end of a dead-end road, and they were literally clustered atop the sign that read DEAD END, staring me the fuck down.  So.  Yea.  Spooky, horror-movie type shit.  I did pee myself.

Then, the movie starts to break down, and here's where the spoilers come in.  After the kid vanishes, they fast forward a whole year, and I hate fast-forwardsessss.  I HATESS THEM, MY PRECIOUSSSS!!!!!  Sorry, haven't done Gollum in ages.  Gollum!  Then there's this typical wife-hates-the-husband-for-losing-their-child bullshit, that they put into EVERY missing kid movie.  I mean, isn't there one goddamn woman out there who goes "I know my husband loved my missing/abducted/lost child as much as I did, and I know he did everything he could to save him.  It's not his fault."  NOPE!  Not one.  So, of course, most of the movie revolves around Nick trying to repair his damaged relationship with his estranged wife AND find out what happened to his kid at the same time, which doesn't have a shit-ton to do with horror.  Gets a bit boring, quite honestly.  If I had known who the villain was at that point, I probably would have started rooting for the bad guy (which I sometimes do anyways).

Then things start to perk up again.  There's this nice little back-story that we find out through research (one of the professor's colleagues is a historian or something) about an innocent witch who is blamed for a plague during the old colonial days, and she and her three kids are burned at the stake.  before she dies, the witch vows to take 3 children every year to replace her own burned kids, and from the missing persons info, it looks like she has been.  There's this little side-bar where we find out the witch's name, as if this is supposed to be important, somehow, but it never comes up, because the colleague is killed right after she imparts the info to the professor.  Now, I'm not sure why the witch-ghost would bother to kill the professor's colleague for passing along this info, because the historian doesn't have a damn thing to do with the missing kids, and the info doesn't seem to mean a damn thing.  But, it happens.  Just for kicks, I guess.

Then things fall apart again, and instead of a meaningful encounter with an angry ghost, we get Nick Cage pretending he's in an action movie.  At his age.  With some crappy special-effects-bullshit ending.  Yea, long story short, some good parts, but not enough to recommend the movie, and not enough to watch it again.  Not sure where I saw it, as I was visiting friends again, but if you get the chance to see it, don't, I guess. :-)  I'm certainly not going to watch Nick Cage twice unless I have to.  He's looking old, and a bit creepy.  He should start doing horror movie villain roles, I think.  He looks the part.

That's all for this month, hope everyone had a nice summer, and yes, I'm going to try and gear up for this October's Halloween Horror-movie Review-a-thon.  Again.  It's kind of the only reason I keep my blog going, at this point.  Horror movie therapy.  BEST.  THERAPY.  EVER.  :-D

Til next time, enjoy your Labor Day holiday (if you have one) and if you're going back to school in a few weeks...  HAHA!!!!  I don't have to do that any more!  Yes!  Yes!  YESYESYESYESYES!  Hah!  Sorry.  Always hated school.  I'm a total introvert.  :-D  Seriously, I feel bad for you, but you'll probably look back on school with fondness.  Post-school reality is really kind of boring.  :-/  Still...  Yes!  No more school!  Yeah!  Homework was my downfall.  I hated homework.  Homework is DA DEVIL!  Wooohooooo!  No more school!  No more school!  No more...  Well, you get the idea.

(snoopy-dances his way through the rest of the weekend)