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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Trading Places (1983)

John Landis is a great director. Well, he WAS. It's been a while since we saw him working at his prime, but Trading Places is one of his best movies. In fact, if Landis hadn't also given us a classic werewolf flick and The Blues Brothers then this could well have been his crowning achievement.

The story is quite simple. Two rich old men (the Duke brothers, played by Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy) make a bet over the effects of nature vs. nurture. To test their theory, they take their shining employee Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Aykroyd) and ruin his life. Louis loses his job, his fiance, his money and most of his self-respect in a series of humiliating trials all set up by the Dukes. At the same time, Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy) is plucked from his hustling, hand-to-mouth lifestyle and offered almost everything that Louis had. The two have traded places, hence the title of the movie. Will Billy Ray become a success, or will he abuse his position to make even more money for himself? And will Louis turn to crime as misfortune piles upon misfortune?

Although it runs for almost 2 hours, with editing never being a strong point for Landis, this zips along at a cracking pace, with quality gags written into every scene, some subtle and some front and centre. This is partly thanks to the script, by Herschel Weingrod and Timothy Harris, but equally thanks to the performances from everyone involved.

Murphy is at his best, the early '80s was arguably the peak of his career, and he delivers almost every line with confidence and sass. Aykroyd just about avoids making you hate him during the opening scenes of the movie, although it's a close call, and it gets easier to enjoy his company as things unravel for him at greater and greater speed. Ameche and Bellamy are delightfully horrid schemers, playing brilliantly off one another from start to finish. Denholm Elliott also does well as the butler who starts off attending to Aykroyd and is then told to take care of Murphy instead, and Jamie Lee Curtis set many hearts a-flutter as Ophelia, the "hooker with a heart" who takes pity on Aykroyd and tries to help him out of his current jam. Paul Gleason is as good as he always is, James Belushi monkeys around in the third act, Kristin Holby is the fiance ashamed of Aykroyd's downward mobility, and there are a couple of cameos worth keeping your eyes peeled for (as usual with a John Landis movie).

For getting the best out of his cast, and treating the material so well, Landis has to be credited with doing a good job here. He certainly had a knack, at one point, of getting great scripts into the hands of the right people for the roles, which does half of his work for him, in my book. There's nothing spectacular here on the technical side, but it's all smooth and well put together. Most importantly, it's all constructed perfectly around the performances and the gags.

If you haven't yet seen this movie then I implore you to get to it as soon as you can. It's an enduring comedy that hasn't lost any of its power in the past few decades. And it then provides you with an extra laugh whenever you get around to watching Coming To America.

9/10

http://www.amazon.com/Trading-Places-Blu-ray-Eddie-Murphy/dp/B00AEBB8EM/ref=sr_1_1_twi_2_twi_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1418340244&sr=8-1&keywords=trading+places