Ghost Chase (1987)

Also known as Hollywood-Monster, apparently.

Before making his name with big-budget fare that often saw the world, or at least major cities, being completely devastated, director Roland Emmerich made some strange, but entertaining, horror and sci-fi films that feel largely forgotten about nowadays. Ghost Chase is perhaps his strangest, and it's yet another film I had wanted to see ever since I was a kid (having been won over by the VHS box art and the trailer).

Fred (Tim McDaniel) is an amateur film director, trying his best to make a film starring his cousin, Warren (Jason Lively). Unfortunately, Warren keeps trying his luck with the leading lady, Laurie (Jill Whitlow), which leads to her leaving, which then leads to the production grinding to a halt. About to drown in debt, things don't look good for Fred and Warren. Their fortunes may change, however, when Warren is asked to attend a reading of his grandfather's will. This is where things get weird. Warren inherits an old clock. That clock contains the spirit of Louis, the man who was the butler to Warren's grandfather. The spirit of Louis inhabits an animatronic butler dummy, built by Fred after a dream vision he had, and he soon starts trying to convince our leads that there should be much more for Warren to inherit, but a scheming producer named Stan Gordon (Paul Gleason) is trying to keep it all to himself.

In case you aren't sure from that plot summary, Ghost Chase is bonkers. It's very silly, it's all over the place (in terms of tone and brief plot tangents), and it seems to have been created by someone wanting to soundtrack scenes with the song "Imagination", as performed by Belouis Some. Emmerich directs from a screenplay co-written by himself and Thomas Kubisch, and it's clear that he's more about enthusiasm and homage than minor things like believability and logic. It's a fantasy horror adventure movie about a ghost butler that makes an animatronic dummy butler come alive, therefore believability and logic don't have to place high on the list of priorities, but it's a shame that things never feel as if they are part of a properly flowing narrative. What you get here is a selection of decent bits, all stuck in between moments of surprising dullness. This should be a blast throughout. It isn't.

It doesn’t help that the cast don’t really feel like a good fit for their roles. Neither Lively nor McDaniel are good enough to carry the film, while both Whitlow and Gleason are sorely underused. Other slightly familiar faces include Ian MacNaughton and Chuck Mitchell, the latter arguably most famous for being Porky in the Porky’s movies.

There’s still a charm to this, it’s a film in which you can see the creativity and sweat used to get anything even half-decent onscreen, and the animatronic dummy is both odd and delightful, but you can tell that it’s made by someone yet to find the focus and vision to match their determination. Still, I am sure many will prefer it to Emmerich’s folly AKA Godzilla.

5/10

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