MOVIE: Pay the Ghost
STARRING: Nicolas Cage, Sarah Wayne Callies, Veronica Ferres, Lyriq Bent, Lauren Beatty, Kalie Hunter, Jack Fulton, Stephen McHattie
RELEASE DATE: September 16th, 2015
WHERE TO WATCH: VOD (Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Vudu)
By Justin Pomerville (2 Broke Geeks)
Mike Lawford (Nicolas Cage) in Pay the Ghost.
Since it’s October and I have already gone through all the obvious horror films that Nicolas Cage has to my knowledge, I had to try and find one that fits the Halloween theme. That’s when I came across 2015’s Pay The Ghost. Will it live up to similar expectations like Mandy or fall flat like Willy’s Wonderland?
Plot is professor Mike Lawford (played by Cage) has his life torn apart when his son Charlie (played by Jack Fulton) is abducted on Halloween night at a parade. One year after his disappearance, we find Mike is still searching, and both him and his wife (played by Sarah Wayne Callies) are haunted by visions that sends them on a trip into the supernatural to unravel the horrifying truth. Mike finds out that on every Halloween night, more children go missing. They are never found and there might be a connection to them all.
Mike (Nicolas Cage) and Charlie (Jack Fulton) in Pay the Ghost.
Overall, this isn’t a terrible film. The supernatural aspect revolving around pagan rituals is something you don’t see too often. My biggest complaint about this film is that the killer, which is a ghost, comes back every Halloween to take 3 children specifically. The complaint isn’t the ghost’s motives, but that everyone else slowly starts understanding what is happening, and then the ghost decides to kill anyone that figures it out. There is some great stuff they could have done like either getting the kids back or protecting the children. But the addition of random ghost murders and jumpscares for a bigger kill count felt unneeded.
Ghost Annie (Kalie Hunter) and Mike (Nicolas Cage) in Pay the Ghost.
The film also felt rushed to cram in all the necessary information about the ghost in a quick 10-minute bit right before the last act. Which, the last act itself also felt rushed. There was no point in this film that I felt like Cage’s character was in danger. There was never a sense of “Will he find his kid?”. It just felt like a generic ghost story that never got out of first gear.
The acting in this film and the plot were alright. If we were comparing other Cage-based horror films, this would probably be closer to the middle of the pile. But on the whole Nic Gauge scale, it is on the lower end of OK.
