Pay the Ghost (2015)

Good movie but grossly overrated

Fantastic!

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The acting in this movie is really good.

There's a lot of build up for nothing, worth watching but it's not an amazing film.

PAY THE GHOST sees the extraordinarily hard-working Nicolas Cage having a go at the horror genre in the form of this miserable, greyed-out ghost story. He plays a somewhat bumbling teacher and father who manages to lose his kid at a carnival and goes on a quest to find him again. It soon transpires that dark supernatural forces are at work, forcing Cage to enter a kind of netherworld to retrieve his child. As with most Hollywood ghost stories, this plays out with a maximum of cheesy CGI effects used to represent ghostliness and a minimum of wit and intelligence. Cage tries hard to invest in his role but doesn't quite succeed while Sarah Wayne Callies doesn't seem to try at all as his wife. As for the scares, well, you can forget about any of them.

Nicolas Cage stars in another low-budget thriller where he finds him playing a New York college professor whose young son is abducted during a Halloween carnival. The ensuing guilt causes a rift with his wife (Sarah Wayne Callies) and leads to a series of nightmares and haunting images that leads him to believe sinister supernatural forces might be involved. Cage tries to elevate the film, and German director Uli Edel (Body of Evidence) brings some modest visual flair. Very little of it is frightening, even by indiscriminate genre standards. But the story tends to become more incoherent that it simply becomes more laughable instead of suspenseful as it goes along. The ending does feel quite rushed and once it comes to an end, it does not feel very satisfying, though it is expected.

In the era of mostly every film being ridiculous garbage, PTG was decent. I saw it for free but I wouldn't have felt ripped off if I paid $7 to see it in the theater. However, that's where it ends. I would be highly uninterested in DVD releases, Special Editions, Director Cuts, etc. During the last 15 mins I was kinda like "Huh? Really??". Kinda hokey - but again - decent.Some parts were a little moving for me because I have two daughters around Charlie's age and I was thinking "What if this happened to them?" (I mean the abduction part - not the part of being held hostage in another dimension by a ghost witch).Worth a watch if nothing else is available but when you wake up the next morning you will have probably already forgotten about it.RKS