Ghosthunters (2016)

Here's the bad news, for some of you anyway. This is another horror movie from The Asylum. It's not bad news for me though. As most people who know me will already know, I have a bit of a soft spot for The Asylum. They have certainly given me some stinkers to endure (and one of their movies was the very first that I gave a deserved 1/10 to) but I tend to find most of their output fairly painless, sometimes easy to laugh at, and sometimes even genuinely entertaining.

Ghosthunters comes close to breaking into the last category. Close, but not close enough. It's all about, as if you couldn't guess, a group of people who spend time in a house trying to hunt some ghosts. One member of the group, Neal (David O'Donnell), has created a device that can capture ghosts and contain their ectoplasm. Another group member, Henry (Stephen Manley), is more motivated than usual as he seeks to free the souls of his murdered wife and daughter.

There are one or two plot twists here that are incredibly silly, and also unnecessary, but Ghosthunters works quite well in a number of scenes. This is The Asylum showing that they can work in similar territory as James Wan and co. and horror fans should be kept relatively entertained by a number of decent, if predictable, scares.

Writer-director Pearry Reginald Teo may not have perfected the art of crafting a good horror script so it's good to know that he at least has a grasp on how to execute the scares, even if they are quite simplistic. They're jump scares that won't make hardened genre veterans jump, which doesn't make them any less enjoyable while the film is trying its hardest.

The cast don't do anything to elevate the script, sadly, and range from the eminently forgettable to the borderline terrible. O'Donnell isn't too bad, nor is Francesca Santoro (playing Amy, another group member), but Manley is a bit too jittery and over the top, and Liz Fenning and Crystal Web feel like their moments could have been combined to make one character.

I still enjoyed this, despite the many mistakes made, but I know that I am often more forgiving than many other viewers. I'd still say that it's worth your time though. A bit of reshuffling of the plot, some tweaking of the script, and perhaps a few more simple scares, and this could have been a genuinely good ghost flick. But then it wouldn't have felt like something from The Asylum, so maybe it's all for the best.

5/10

The DVD is available here.