For this installment of Bad Movie Review, Margaux suggested going back to where it all began: Nicolas Cage. We watched Pay the Ghost, and were frustrated by its almost aggressive mediocrity. Read on – IF YOU DARE!
Trevor: :Nicolas Cage is maddening. I don’t mean that in the usual sense people say it, as in “Moonstruck, Leaving Las Vegas, and Adaptation show how good he is, so why does he so much crap?” I mean, you suggested this feature for the express purpose of watching bad Nic Cage movies (well, you said “bad Netflix movies,” but we all know what we had in mind). Our very first feature was Stolen. And we have yet to discover anything truly horrendous, like Wicker Man bad. Pay the Ghost is a bit of a slog, but it’s not bad enough to be good, and it’s not good enough to overlook its flaws. It’s a line drive right down the middle: I’d never pay to see it in theaters, but we have watched much worse films for Bad Movie Review.
Margaux: But that’s not to say that Pay the Ghost is actually watchable, it’s very snoozeworthy. I definitely checked my phone a lot, not because I’m cool/popular or so consumed by social media, but because I was literally killing time while this played on without me. To quote my boyfriend, who walked into the movie mid-watch, “I had no idea this movie existed,” and I’m pretty sure that was no accident on the part of the marketing department of Pay the Ghost. This movie is probably one of the most recent releases we’ve watched for this column (it came out some time last year), but like you said, it wasn’t good-bad, or even bad-bad (see The Third Wheel) it was right down the middle. We got some classic Nic Cage-isms, him just running around and shouting a character’s name, but then we got a lot of weird nonsense that was so genuine in its attempt, it never pushed this…thriller (? was this a horror movie or thriller, it never quite made up its mind) one way or other.
Trevor: However, there was one great so-bad-its-good sequence: Nic Cage spends easily twenty minutes of this movie dressed like a cowboy. Not a Deadwood cowboy, but a Buck Owens-type cowboy, with the spangly shirt, the kind you’d see on stage at a Reno matinee. Him frantically searching for his son in this ridiculous getup was the highlight of the film for me. I wish he wore that outfit the entire time. In fact, there’s a 90% chance those are his own clothes and he showed up to set wearing them. We will never understand Nicolas Cage.
Margaux: During this 20 minute stretch of NIc Cage running around like a loon in a cowboy outfit, stopping every single person he came across in this busy Halloween carnival, he reminded me of Al Pacino in 88 Minutes when he stops every student on the NYU campus asking, “WAS IT YOU?!” he runs…I don’t know how many New York City blocks and his hair DOES NOT MOVE ONCE.
Trevor: Not gonna lie, that carnival – held in suburban New York, evidently – looked kinda fun. I would go to that. That’s one of those moments in Pay the Ghost where you think, hey, this isn’t completely shitty (also, a lot of this movie looked good, which was a plus). But then you get moments like Cage (I’m not going to refer to him by his character’s name, which I’ve already forgotten) teaching what looks to be a 50-person class on Wolfgang von Goethe. That’s insane. And it’s the classic “professor gives lecture directly related to the plot” scene. If I went to whatever school Cage taught at, and he spent the whole lecture play-acting Faust (I think it was Faust, but that’s only because I don’t know any other Goethe) I’d want my fucking money back.
Margaux: The fact that they casted Cage as an on-the-cusp tenured professor really made me giggle, they even put him in a ridiculous sweater vest that the costume department clearly thought screamed, “PROFESSOR SMARTYPANTS.” But yeah, at one point, I wrote in my notes, “I think Cage is teaching a class on ‘Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,’” as far I could tell.
I do disagree with you on the point that you thought the movie looked good, I thought the amount of shaky cam and green haze filter used made everything look kind of gross and puke inducing. And the carnival looked like total garbage! Who was that carnival for?! Gypsies? It was part Mardi Gras, part Halloween, all definitely not for kids.
Trevor :Okay, let me backtrack a little bit: the shaky cam definitely did not work, and every time that transition was made it was jarring as hell. But you could tell this film was trying to pay visual homage to New York-set horror movies like The Omen or Rosemary’s Baby, insofar as it tried to replicate that cold, muted version of suburbia.
Margaux: Like the ultimate suburban line, “did Rosa take you to art class today?” these people have no problems, even though they go through great lengths to set up this pumpkin carving bullshit as some sort of make or break moment between Cage and Lori. Like, she’ll divorce the shit outta him if he doesn’t carve this damn pumpkin with their annoying son.
Trevor: I wouldn’t give the film an Oscar, but it showed that there was at least a little bit of competence behind the scenes.
One thing that bugged me, though, was the constant fake-outs about Cage’s son Charlie (side note: of course his son’s name was Charlie, the most generic name you can give to a male character outside of maybe Will). Cage thinks he sees Charlie on the bus: well, movie, you’re half an hour old, we know that’s not Charlie on the bus. And why were there so many people standing? There were four or five open seats! That bus scene bugged the shit out of me, not only because we’ve seen it, and scenes like it, a million times before, but it’s only been good maybe once.
And in reference to your above point: who carves a pumpkin on Halloween? For a movie so obsessed with it, Pay the Ghost has no idea how Halloween works.
Margaux: To build off your gripe with the bus scene, Pay the Ghost, I think didn’t so much “paid homage” as it did just cash in a lot of horror/thriller tropes that have either been done to death and/or have only worked well for one or two movies. The cold open was a flashback to 1679 – which, unlike The Cobbler, does get explained at one point, but the explanation is kind of dumb. Couple the old timey flashback as an opening, along with a vast majority of minor characters saying the title of the film throughout, these are never good signs of writing and directing. So in a certain sense, Pay the Ghost should of gone full blown terrible instead of showing signs of restraint, which ultimately gave it its uneven tone.
Trevor: Oh man, imagine a drinking game with one rule: drink every time someone says “pay the ghost.” And for what it’s worth, Pay the Ghost is a pretty cool title. I don’t know why I’m suddenly being so charitable towards this movie, which took me forever to watch cause I kept pausing to check Twitter and generally be a douchebag.
I thought of something that was bad-good: the haunted Razor scooter! That’s gotta be a first right? I mean, it’s so dumb that if another movie had done, I would have heard about it by now.
Margaux: Haha it was a such a throw away moment, one I wish we either got more of or none at all, the only thing that would make a haunted Razor scooter more terrifying is to see a full grown adult with Google Glasses on it (a scary sight seen TOO often in San Francisco). And let’s not forget the very brief foray into the psychic-medium, who is no Billie Dean Howard (Sarah Paulson from season 1 AHS). I mean, Lori from The Walking Dead and Cage go from obsessively refreshing the Missing Children Database page to calling up this psychic and just as quickly as this woman is introduced she dies. I honestly don’t even know if they bothered to name her, one minute she’s in Charlie’s room, the next she’s getting flung about by an invisible force and BOOM dead town USA, population: her.
Trevor: Ah, who could forget the classic character “Psychic Medium.” It’s so easy to name characters. I maen it’s really easy. If you’re gonna kill her, just call her Jane Smith or some fuckin thing. I thought the way she died was cool – internal combustion – and I liked her dress. Man, I must be off my game; usually you and I are Statler and Waldorf like a motherfucker, but I guess my heart grew three sizes over Christmas break.
Margaux: It’s weird how many people Cage meets throughout this movie who know how to pay this ghost yet, cannot articulate any helpful information to him.
Trevor: Oh my god, everyone was just a fucking exposition machine! The first person he talked to, no matter where he was, knew exactly what he needed to know.
Margaux: Right? Even the underground shanty town was like, “oh I know who you gotta talk to, but he’s not here”. You’re surprisingly together, why are you living like you’re in the un-fun version of Fury Road? Once they threw in their “homage” to The Exorcist though, I was out – it was kind of maddening and annoying to watch Lori butcher herself and the script butcher a good old fashioned possession. Give me projectile vomit, give me levitating, something better than a creepy voice and dead eyes.
Trevor: Yet another instance of Pay the Ghost screwing up what could have been a good scene. Ultimately this movie was just a pastiche of effective scenes from other movies, and nowhere was that more apparent when Cage went to retrieve Charlie from the witch’s creepy cabin.
(No, readers, we’re not going to explain this.)
Did you ever see Insidious? This entire scene is straight out of Insidious.
Margaux: Is that the one with Rose Byrne? Or the one with Vera Farmiga? Cause I’ve seen neither one, but I do what you’re talking about.
Trevor: Rose Byrne, although I do like The Conjuring, which is the Farmiga one. Some people don’t like it, but fuck em, it’s better than Pay the Ghost.
Margaux: They probably are, even the sequels are allegedly most likely better than Pay the Ghost. But I do want to briefly talk about Nic Cage passing into some witch alternate universe because first of all, shanty town shaman tells him he only has 15 minutes to find his shithead son and Cage seems VERY CHILL about finding him even though he’s about to enter -to my eyes at least – Bowser’s Castle. And whether I was Cage or about to enter Bowser’s Castle, I’d be very anxious and not trying to “take to my time,” I’d be trying to frantically find my stupid kid and bounce. But I guess once you’ve lived through Wicker Man, you’ve seen it all? Anyway, so, when Cage calls out Charlie’s name and all of these ghost kids (?) raise their hands, like, oh yeah ALL of you are Charlie?! Get the fuck outta here. Wait, you guys can’t, my B.
Trevor: I agree it was dumb for them to all raise their hands, but – and we’ll probably disagree again here – I thought the sea of dead kids was a pretty effective visual. Sue me! However, I didn’t like the earlier use of a kid wearing a spooky cloth hood: we get it, you’ve seen The Orphanage and The Strangers. That’s the most maddening thing about Pay the Ghost: it has not an original thought in its head, except for a haunted scooter.
Margaux: Which is doubly unfortunately because this is one of the few movies that is original, not based anything, like a Better Homes and Garden article or a book/novella, etc. The ending was super anticlimactic, there was never a sense of danger or “will they make it out??”, it actually felt more like the writer was like, OH SHIT I’m already at 90 pages, better wrap up this nonsense. The only thing that would’ve saved the ending for me is if Cage and Lori just pretended it was still the same year in which their son had disappeared. Can you say SEQUEL? No, you can’t because no one saw this and it does not warrant a sequel whatsoever. They did, in all seriousness I think, try to set up a sequel or at least attempt a The Graduate ending. There’s a blond woman at the end who I think they were trying to allude as the next “crying-child snatching woman.”
Trevor: If they do a sequel, please promise me we’ll see it in theaters. By which I mean the one theater in America that might actually play Pay the Ghost 2. Oh wait: Pay 2he Ghost. There we go.
Margaux: Pay the Ghost More 2: Student Loans. We’re pretty good at this, WHERE IS OUR 4 PICTURE DEAL, NETFLIX?!
Trevor: I would love to get a Netflix deal where can only do sequels to movies we’ve covered for this feature. What are you thinking for star count? I mean, we’ve seen worse movies than this, but The Cobbler isn’t a high bar to hurdle. This is a two-star movie for me. It doesn’t care enough to be bad.
Margaux: That is such an apt review of Pay the Ghost I’d like to submit it for a DVD cover quote: “doesn’t care enough to be bad.” Because I was expecting more full blown bad and was really let down on that front that I’d have to give this movie 1.5 stars.
Trevor: I can dig it. Not bad enough to be bad – what a world we live in. Like I said, we will never understand Nic Cage.
Margaux: At least his wig showed up to work. Never lets us down.
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