Pipes says we’ve got to stay! Pipes wants to see everybody!
BBC is broadcasting a live ghost hunt on television. A family is being terrorized by something they can’t explain. The crew working for BBC is trying to see if they are telling the truth and document the events happening in the house. But why can’t they just call Ghostbusters? I’m talking about the real Ghostbusters, not the female Fakebusters!
In 1992, BBC showed a TV movie. Most kids who grew up at the time will probably remember Ghostwatch. It scared an entire generation. It doesn’t quite have the same effect today, but I understand why young people were scared when they were 8-10 years old.
This movie could give children a traumatic experience. The reason for that is that if you came home, and you didn’t know that Ghostwatch was just a movie and were a sissy, then you would be in trouble! It looks like a real live broadcast to the smallest detail. So for younger children, this becomes a reality. The parents in the UK were pissed off after their kids got terrified after watching the movie. So if you wanted to scare the kids in the house, you could have a lot of fun with Ghostwatch.
Ghostwatch has its qualities because it seems like it’s a live broadcast. The problem is that it takes too long before something interesting happens. There are too many phone calls from the viewers that try to build up the atmosphere at the start. But they fail with that attempt until they get an important phone call where a person tells the story of a scary man. Suddenly Ghostwatch wakes up, and it’s easy to see where The Blair Witch Project got its idea from.
It’s also fun to keep your eyes glued to the screen to see if you can see the ghost. I spotted the ghost at least 4-5 times, but the ghost appears in many other scenes too. And the ghost is pretty creepy. Especially when we hear the creepy stories of its past.
I wasn’t aware of this, but the story is almost the same as in The Blair Witch Project. And I thought that The Blair Witch Project had taken its ideas from Cannibal Holocaust. It has with the found footage style, but the story itself is borrowed from Ghostwatch, which may have borrowed some ideas from other movies. I don’t know everything! Goddamit!
The youngest actors aren’t good. The adults do an acceptable job. But it gets too silly with the skeptic and his weak arguments. The TV host is high on himself. He sniffs his own farts! Look at this idiot! Sniff my fart and die, old man! Sniff it!
The movie wakes up in the last 20 minutes. Before that, Ghostwatch is pretty boring with too many silly phone calls. But it puts mental images in your head in some scenes before it turns on the charm again.
The last 20 minutes are interesting and suspenseful. But we never get an answer to what happened after the broadcast. The ending is an open ending. When the end credits appeared on the screen, I thought of Ring, so I’m not sure if Ghostwatch has inspired Ring since the Ring novel was written in 1991.
Ghostwatch is an interesting movie that many movies after 1992 have copied. It’s a playful movie, and I can see that it can turn many viewers off in the first 30 minutes. It feels like a light and positive movie with a crew who laughs and is having fun. But after a while, it turns into a darker movie when some callers tell stories about the neighborhood and the house. I loved that buildup. It puts mental images in your head as the best movies do in this genre.