I've never gone ghost hunting. It's not that I'm an outright skeptic - I've actually looked around at some local groups with half-serious thoughts about going. (Apparently, with some groups you can just pay and go on an investigation. Sweet!) But the fact that you sometimes have to sign a waiver absolving the group of any guilt if a demon follows you home... that's enough for me to take a pass. Even if I don't believe in 99% of it, I'm not risking fucking around with the underworld, you know?
Anyways, despite my lack of practical ghost hunting experience, I've seen a ton of ghost hunting movies. And while that certainly doesn't make me an expert, I think I know enough to say that the folks in The Ghost Club are really bad at it.
My Synopsis: Apparently, the Ghost Club is a real thing with a storied history and some notable members. Here, the Ghost Club is just a group of - you guessed it - nobody ghost hunters. For what it's worth, they do honor the history of the club by wearing old timey clothes. Anyways, they go into a mansion reputed to be haunted, with predictable results.
Elaborate Genre: A little bit but not really Found Footage Haunted House
Overall: Not very good. The characters are dull and there's a surprising lack of tension for a haunted house flick.
I guess the most notable thing about The Ghost Club is the style it's shot in. You just kind of assume that it would be found footage, or a fake TV show - there's even title cards that pop up every now and again - but it's totally not. Sometimes it's shot like that, in a sort of reality show/documentary style - but then it'll switch to a third person/cinematic angle. So it's kind of strange. You could fast forward to a random scene and swear it's found footage. They even address the camera directly at times, but the "camera person" is never introduced as a character. Nor is the camera ever passed around like it would be in most of these types of things. So it's either a weird, kind of jarring mash-up, or the worst executed found footage film of all time.
The members of the ghost club are just kind of dull and don't have an awful lot of chemistry. You get a pretty standard group here - the skeptic, the believer, the tech guy, the sensitive... and the 19th Century Tech Person? They occasionally bicker in uninteresting ways. One of them says "systematic" a lot, and one of them is super sexy. As a group, they aren't *actively* annoying, so that's something, at least.
There are a couple of good things about The Ghost Club. (1) The production value is reasonably high for a film like this, and (2) William Forsythe is in it. He gets top billing, despite it being a very small role. He owns (or is the caretaker) of the haunted mansion, and gives the team a tour early on in the film. He's not super energetic here but he's not half-assing it either - he's the most engaging presence in a film that is mostly lacking them.
But once Forsythe gets outta the picture, there's some bad ghost hunting going on. Considering the team is looking to document evidence, they have a surprising lack of equipment. One character spends a lot of time writing things down - there aren't many skeptics that are going to be won over by whatever she was writing in her notebook. They don't really have much by way of cameras, and the device that gets the most play is the little thing that tells them the temperature. (There are cold spots, you see.) Which, as you would expect, just doesn't come across well on film. And almost all ghost hunting films have an EVP scare or two - it's the easiest and cheapest thing you can do! Here, you get one short scene that goes nowhere. Which describes a lot of the scenes for the first half of the movie - there are five rooms and you only spend a little time in each. Nothing is given a chance to breathe (or to build to anything) because it's always in a rush to see what's in the next room.
When they do eventually find some ghosts or whatever, it's pretty lackluster. The ghosts are just translucent people, which I actually appreciated. If you can't pull of elaborate special effects, don't even try. But the issue is that the ghosts aren't presented in a way that's scary - jump scares, tension building, or otherwise. One moves a chair, I guess. And I suppose they deserve credit for *not* having someone get dragged away from the camera by their feet. And to give credit where credit is due, there was a levitation bit that I enjoyed for it's ridiculousness.
The Ghost Club is rated PG-13 according to Amazon Prime. It also says it's a "fun, sexy, tongue-in-cheek movie about a TV reality ghost show." There are five claims there, and about one-and-a-half are true. One is that The Ghost Club is, in fact, a movie. But, there are at least three F-Bombs here, and a sex scene that seems to have a little too much grunting and thrusting for your standard PG-13 fare. But whatever - if this was rated R it'd be a serious disappointment, considering there's a major lack of blood/gore/scares/etc.
I've ragged on Ghost Club a lot, but honestly it's not the worst. It's competently shot and the story more or less escalates at a reasonable pace. It's a little slow at times, but it's never actively irritating. There's just not a ton to like here, but there's not a lot to get mad at either. But in this case the glass is half empty.
I would not recommend this film.
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