Friday, October 6, 2017

NETFLIX AND KILL: PAY THE GHOST (2015) ***


Nicolas Cage stars as a workaholic professor whose son keeps seeing a shrouded figure at his window at night.  He takes him to a Halloween carnival and the kid asks, “Can we pay the ghost” before vanishing into the crowd.  Cage’s marriage quickly crumbles as he becomes obsessed with finding his son.  One year later, he starts hearing his son’s voice.  Pretty soon, Cage starts seeing glimpses of ghost kids everywhere.  When he sees “PAY THE GHOST” graffitied on the side of an abandoned building, he goes inside to investigate.  Maybe, just maybe, the creepy blind homeless guy inside knows what’s going on. 

Cage plays the kind of professor who uses different voices when he recites poetry and receives a round of applause from his students afterwards.  (Well, he is Nic Cage after all.)  That’s the only time he really goes over the top.  Throughout the film, he is on his A-Game and while at first glance this might seem like straight-to-DVD junk, it’s actually a solid little flick. 

Directed by Uli (Last Exit to Brooklyn) Edel, Pay the Ghost is better than you’d expect at just about every turn.  Although it’s not what you would call scary, it takes itself very seriously.  There are some over-the-top deaths reminiscent of The Omen, but for the most part, it’s about how the loss of a child tears a parent’s world apart.  Initially, I thought this was going to be kind of like a horror version of Stolen.  However, it has a decent mythology surrounding its mysterious specter and Edel delivers an occasional creepy moment. 

The finale where Cage crosses over to “the other side” to find his son is a bit like the end of Poltergeist mixed with the bridge scene from Temple of Doom.  If that doesn’t make you want to see it, nothing will.  Sure, some of the CGI effects are cheesy, but the scene where Cage encounters a cabin full of thousands of zombified children is rather effective. 

Note:  This is the second movie in my Netflix and Kill binge that featured a father and son dangling perilously above a bottomless pit to Hell.

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