I first heard about Ghost House earlier this year, when I saw a trailer for it, thought that it looked moderately interesting - and then promptly forgot about it until I saw Temple last week and briefly got the two films confused. But no, while unlikely to win any awards anytime soon, Ghost House is still streets ahead of the muddled misery that was Temple.
Julie and Jim are a young couple of vacation in Thailand. It's a dream vacation, and when Jim proposes to Julie it only promises to get better. That night when celebrating they meet two British men, Robert and Billy, who suggest a couple of places that the happy couple should visit. One of these places is a graveyard of sorts for old 'ghost houses' - shrines erected to mollify and shelter spirits who might cause problems for a household. Thai culture means that people are wary of destroying the houses, lest the spirits become angry, so they place them in 'graveyards' away from the cities. Robert and Billy have ulterior motives, however, and trick Julie into picking up a trinket from one of the ghost houses, thus cursing herself to have her soul taken by a particularly angry and spiteful spirit whose ghost house it was. Now Jim has just three days to find a way to lift the curse from Julie or lose her forever...
It's interesting to look at two similar films one after another, especially when one of those films is as bad as Temple was. I mean, don't get me wrong - Ghost House is hardly a masterpiece, but it's still better than Temple was. One of the first things it gets right is that it makes its important plot points, such as the tradition of the ghost houses in Thailand and the story of the malevolent spirit who ends up haunting Julie, clear to its audience early on in the film and without too much expositional info-dumping. It might not be the most original storyline, but its at least clearly laid out to the audience.
On the other hand, most of our protagonists are quite lacking. Once she's cursed, Julie (played by Scout Taylor-Compton from Rob Zombie's Halloween movies) becomes more or less a non-entity - a walking plot device and little more - and so it's left to her fiance Jim to save the day and carry the movie - and he is so not equipped for that. Sorry Jim, but you have the personal charm of a wet weekend in Weston-super-mare. He's not particularly likeable - mere hours after proposing to Julie, he's off to a strip club with his new 'friend' Robert, despite it being clear that Julie is not okay with this, and then, later on, he fails to understand why she's so upset that he came out with lipstick all over his mouth. Later in the film, when a wizened old witch doctor tells him that he needs to make a sacrifice to help save Julie, and that sacrifice is a finger, he actually baulks at it. Dude, that's allegedly the woman you love there - not to mention that a single finger is quite the bargain in this sort of situation. Usually, it's at least three fingers, or even a hand, foot or eye(s). Do you actually love Julie or not?
Instead, I found myself rooting for one of the secondary protagonists - Gogo the taxi driver. Jim and Julie meet him at the airport when they arrive in Thailand, and he quickly becomes their driver, translator, guide and, once Julie is cursed, he steps up his game to an incredible level. First, he takes her to his home village where his family members and a Buddhist monk pray over her for a day and give her protective amulets. When that doesn't work, he helps Jim track down a shaman called Reno who might be able to help. And then finally, he ferries them to the old witch doctor and even helps in the exorcism ritual. All this for a couple he barely knows - now that's good service. At the end of that, I don't think he deserves a tip so much as them just wiring half their salaries to him every month for the rest of their lives.
The character of Reno - "I'm more of a sham than a shaman these days," - is also an interesting one, although they don't explore him nearly as much. Then again, you could argue that we learn most of what we need to when we first meet him - in the back room of an obscure brothel, surrounded by Thai ladyboys.
The ghost effects are mostly of the "Ooga-Booga-boo!" kind, which is also something of a disappointment as there are occasional moments where we see ghosts other than vengeful ghost house spirit that I'd have liked to have known more about - such as the elephant rider Julie sees at one point. But overall, Ghost House pretty much delivers what it needs to to be an acceptable and mildly interesting supernatural horror.
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