Ghoul (2015)
Directed by Petr Jákl
Starring Jennifer Armour, Alina Golovlyova, Jeremy Isabella, Paul S. Tracey
Every once in a while (read: almost every day), I get the compulsion to explore something new and expand my critical repertoire (read: not my actual work). On such occasions, I frequently peruse the “to-do” list of DVDs that litter the DreadCentral coffee table like an advent calendar or neglected deadlines. This results in a russian roulette of quality, with the suicidal blast of the shit movie being a fine price to pay for the sweet rush of hitting a movie that doesn’t kill you. It is an apt analogy for Ghoul, as I can say with much certainty that this movie was not as bad as putting a loaded gun to my head and pulling the trigger.
It also wasn’t great. As I have stated before, I have a much greater tolerance for found footage films than many of my similarly overly exposed horror brethren, but perhaps I am beginning to feel the fatigue. The false jump scares, inexplicable insistence to carry the camera everywhere, the nonsense framework that draws all these characters together, these are all things that with a growing pit in my heart have come to expect and resent. The movie is a far cry from creatively bereft, but it does enough the same to prevent it from being really memorable.
In a format all too familiar, four friends embark with naught but a camera and a dream of creating a documentary series about 20th century cannibals. Traveling to Ukraine to investigate the claims of widespread cannibalism caused by Stalin’s economic repression in the 1930s, they meet a reported cannibal who they want to interview in the place he reportedly ate people. Why they couldn’t just interview him there and be done with it is beyond me, but we had to get the characters in the spooky house somehow, and this is as good of a way as any. Immediately, we find that money is tight, creating a paper thin motivation for the characters to stick around well into when any reasonable group would have taken the first nope-train to fuck-this town.
Things go from cannibal to ghosty pretty fast, with the introduction of a psychic, summoning table, and allegations that actually an evil spirit is the cause of all the people eating, and not widespread repression and desperation. While waiting for the cannibal guy to show up, they decide to get eastern european drunk and wind up summoning the spirit while black out drunk. Man, when I wake up from a bender, I just have to send a bunch of apology texts, not banish a demon.
They soon learn that the spirit doesn’t want them to leave, and after the plot required amount of disbelief they eventually figure out that they are indeed being ghosted hard and try to appease it. This goes poorly, more bad stuff happens, characters die, credits. It’s a pretty basic structure, but then again this is a found footage horror movie. Premise is secondary to execution, and to that effect the movie did a few interesting things.
I could see what they were going for with this film. They are trying to build a world that is dangerous and foreign, where the antagonist doesn’t explain itself and the characters don’t have every piece to the puzzle. It makes for a more terrifying antagonist when you can’t predict what it will do, and I must admit that I did not predict where this movie was going. Despite how I was able to foresee the general structure and premise, the actual twists themselves were at the very worst interesting.
There were also a few scenes that I thought were good. There was one in particular where the ghost is having sex with the female protagonists simultaneously in a method reminiscent of the powerful scene from Lovely Molly. The film overall looks good, and is well framed and shot for a found footage movie. The acting is also pretty good as well, with the possession element creating a reasonable framework for why the characters sometime act irrationally.
The main issue is that all the parts that are good are tied together very poorly. The interesting and vague world they create introduces rules willy nilly and without any sense of reason. For example, they explain that the spirit can be kept at bay with an open flame. There isn’t explanation behind this other than that the psychic lady says so. In something like Alien, which similarly tries to create terror with minimal explanation, there is the reasonable explanation that the Xenomorph is at the end of the day just an animal, and animals are scared of fire. Does this also apply to cannibal ghosts?
And why does the ghost get stronger the farther away they are from the house? If the house is warded against the ghost and it is weakest there, how come it can ghost rape someone while they sleep? If it can possess you if a possessed person scratches you, then how did the girl get scratched by a ghost while being raped? So does a possessed person have to scratch you, or is it all just whatever the ghost feels like? Why does the ghost lead them on this breadcrumb trail if in the end all he needed was to ghost rape a woman and eat some people?
The whole movie is just things being introduced and us being expected to accept them. I really liked the interesting premise, but it didn’t back it up well. Give me a reason why any of this makes sense, Ghoul. This was written with an interesting premise, as a ghoul is traditionally a revenant or creature that sustains itself off of the flesh of human beings, and I certainly haven’t seen a cannibal ghost movie before.
Unfortunately, the cannibal and ghost parts are completely divorced. I was watching a poltergeist movie, and out of the blue the ghost tells them to eat each other, and I went, “oh yeah, this is about cannibals or something.” Aside from the basic premise, it doesn’t play into the story. It is all just so disconnected that any kind of satisfying interplay falls flat.
Even worse, the interesting parts are marred by cliche. As a found footage movie, something spooky had to happen during one of the fixed camera shots where everyone is out of the house or no one is watching. And of course, there had to be camera distortion. I get that something kind of interesting is happening to the cat in the shot, but I’m distracted by the predictable setup. You bet your ass that the first few scares of the movie are them turning around only to be startled by a pair of boots or an animal jumping out.
Ghoul is watchable. It is even, dare I say, enjoyable. I didn’t by any stretch hate this movie. It is well enough done that I never found myself being taken out of the experience. I am mostly bitter from what I saw as a novel concept done poorly. It just wasn’t compelling. Both as a film critic and as someone who enjoys to turn their brain off and just watch a movie, it was just mediocre. It was more enjoyable to drunk Ted that doesn’t notice film convention, but not by a significant amount. If you enjoy Ghoul, I can certainly see why, but there is too much here that bothers me to enjoy the parts that I like.
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
