THE 31 DAYS OF HORROR-WEEN: PRIME EVIL: A GHOST STORY (2017) **

You know, we’re only a week into The 31 Days of Horror-Ween and I decided I needed a little break.  After all the vampire clowns, horny bigfoots, and psychic Spocks I’ve been dealing with, I thought it would be nice to change things up and watch something a little classy.  I thought maybe a ghost movie starring an Oscar winner would be just the thing to wash out the taste of such cheap movies like Varan the Unbelievable and Gallery of Horror.  I was wrong.  The monster in Varan was a guy in a rubber suit.  The vampires in Gallery of Horror just had plastic fangs.  The ghost in this critically-acclaimed film was… are you ready for this?  Just a dude in a sheet.  Casey Affleck in a sheet, but still.  I kinda knew A Ghost Story wasn’t really horror, but I thought at least it would be good.  Nope. 

It mostly plays like a Terrance Malick soap opera.  A couple sits around talking, then there’s a random shot of the stars.  Then the couple mumbles for a bit.  There are shots of stuff that happen in real time, like someone hauling garbage to the curb.  Other shots of people remaining perfectly still feel even longer.  In fact, more than a few times I thought the streaming went out or my TV froze because no one was moving for so long. 

Anyway, Affleck dies.  He comes back as a ghost wearing a white sheet with holes cut out.  I’m not lying when I say he looks almost exactly like Charlie Brown on It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.  He comes back from the afterlife to watch over his wife (Rooney Mara), but all he gets to see is her doing mundane shit like washing her hands, doing chores, or stuffing her face.

You know, I kind of figured the afterlife would be like that. 

Mostly this is a movie about someone watching someone else.  Marvel as Affleck watches Mara go to work.  Thrill as he stares at her staring out the window.  The action highlight is when Affleck watches Mara eat a pie.  I don’t mean just a slice either.  I mean a whole pie.  I’m not making this up.

At least when Michael Myers wore a sheet, he stabbed someone. 

Not to worry, there is some mildly horrific stuff about halfway through.  It’s not really effective, but at least here the movie starts showing signs of a pulse.  As the movie goes on, it eventually becomes clear what director David (Pete’s Dragon) Lowery is trying to do, and quite honestly, it’s not a bad idea.  It’s just that the minimalistic approach is a bit too minimalistic for its own good.

What isn’t minimalistic is the scene where a bunch of squatters go in Affleck’s house and throw a party.  There, a random drunk dude endlessly pontificates a lot of nonsense about the meaning of life.  You know you’re in trouble when you have to rely on a random drunk dude to hammer home the message of the movie.  Honestly, I think we would’ve got the idea without his explanation anyway, so for a film so minimalistic, the monologue feels more like a gratuitous exposition dump than anything.

Quite honestly, A Ghost Story does get better as it goes along.  It’s kind of fun just to see Affleck trying to emote from under a bedsheet.  However, it never really grabs you.  Something tells me reading an oral history of The Pie Scene would be more entertaining than watching the actual movie.