GHOSTER (2022)

GHOSTER (2022)

Tagline: Nope.

(Adventure, Family, Ghost Dragons) [PG]

Just give me a final 24 hours and then you and the Golden Dragon Corporation can commence demolition. 

The story in this film revolves around a girl named Elizabeth and her father James who move to a family estate called Echoville Manor. James is in massive debt so the bank comes to get the property from him sooner than expected. It doesn’t take long before Elizabeth discovers that the Manor is haunted by a friendly ghost named Ghoster, who needs to defeat a ghost dragon named Yuto that preys on Elizabeth’s mother's family line to continue its quest for immortality. Yuto also wants to destroy Echoville Manor trapping Ghoster forever, so there’s that. 

One thing that needs to be considered is that this movie is meant for kids. I literally saw it on the Pluto streaming services kids' channel. A lot of these movies end up being vehicles for bigger things later for the actors involved, but everyone in this movie is just very bad except for Sophie Proctor who plays Elizabeth. She gives me slight Emma Roberts vibes from back when she was in HOTEL FOR DOGS. Proctor just started acting 4 years ago, so only time will tell if her career takes off or not, but I wish her the best because she is a bright spot here. The next least bad is Rachel G. Whittle who plays Connie. Unfortunately, Connie only gets about 3 minutes of screen time. Everyone else, and I say this begrudgingly, is just flat-out terrible, even for a kid’s movie. 

Regarding the effects, we get some bad and some not-so-bad. There is a ton of CGI in the first and last acts and when it comes to the knights and the actual dragon design, things are fine. When it comes to everything else it looks very late 90s video-gamish. 

So looking at the positives, this is a bit of a different story from what we normally get in a ghost story. The movie was released in October, but it’s not a horror flick by any means. It’s meant for the “Casper the friendly ghost” crowd. It’s creatively done and the visuals are decent enough for kids. There is also no profanity or anything super dark. It’s kind of a fun little fantasy story. 

When we get to the stuff that doesn’t work, this film is just a bit too bogged down by bad acting and mounds of super cheese that isn’t the good kind of cheese you want. Because of the bad acting and a shaky script, I really couldn’t connect to anything emotional here, so maybe that's a good thing. It’s not like watching Optimus Prime die in his big movie debut or anything back in the 80s. It’s way tamer and way more light-hearted than that. I do wish the men in this movie were more the kind of men kids would look up to instead of making Elizabeth handle everything. In that regard, the father is pretty pathetic as a character and as a role model. If this dude was raising me, one of my grandfathers would have punched him in the nuts. Having said that, Elizabeth on the other hand is a good role model. So you have to take the good with the bad on this one I guess. 

GHOSTER gets a 3 out of 7, but with the caveat that there is a bunch of other actual garbage your kids could be watching that would be far worse than this one. They did end it in such a way that it suggests they wouldn’t mind doing a part 2 at some point. 

GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF LIONSGATE AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY.