Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.5

Pay the Ghost Blu-ray Movie Review

Pay the Tax Man

Reviewed by Michael Reuben November 8, 2015

With a little-known character actor in the lead, Pay the Ghost might have been a diverting supernatural thriller, predictable but well-executed, with just enough style to keep genre fans entertained for an afternoon or evening. The German director, Uli Edel, has certainly proven his ability to tell a story effectively. His early American feature, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989), a dramatization of the book by Hubert Selby Jr., remains a cult classic, not soon forgotten by anyone who has seen it. His 2008 historical drama, The Baader Meinhof Complex, a finalist for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, masterfully recreated a period while deconstructing a political movement. He has directed episodes of such groundbreaking TV series as Twin Peaks, OZ and Homicide: Life on the Street.

Unfortunately, Pay the Ghost is more akin to Edel's ill-fated Madonna vehicle, Body of Evidence, and for much the same reason: its star. Nicolas Cage is the film's protagonist, and he's more than capable in the role, but that's exactly the point. Cage is over-qualified for the part. The Oscar-winning star of Leaving Las Vegas, the action hero of The Rock, the Oscar-nominated co-star of Adaptation and the Bad Lieutenant from Port of Call New Orleans, is far too familiar a face and brings too much baggage to the screen to disappear into a small genre film. At this stage in his career, Cage should be plumbing the depths of complex and original characters, not embodying genre stereotypes, presumably for money (his financial problems having been widely reported). To his professional credit, Cage doesn't "phone in" his performance in Pay the Ghost. There just isn't much for someone like him to perform.

Mike Lawford (Cage) is a literature professor at a New York City university, who is anxiously awaiting a decision on tenure. His friend and colleague, Hannah (Veronica Ferres), is his chief supporter. She also happens to be an expert on the early American colonies and their inhabitants, and her knowledge will prove invaluable later in the film. The script by Dan Kay (adapted from a novel by British writer Tim Lebbon) makes no effort at subtlety in foreshadowing the relevance of Hannah's expertise with a pre-credits prologue set in 1679.

Mike is so absorbed in work that he is late getting home on Halloween, thereby breaking his promise to his young son, Charlie (Jack Fulton), that they'll carve pumpkins and go trick-or-treating together. Charlie's mother, Kirsten (Sarah Wayne Callies), takes Charlie instead. Mike feels so guilty that, when he gets home, he accedes to Charlie's pleas to visit a Halloween carnival, over Kristen's objections. At the carnival, Charlie disappears, abducted by a dark figure that the boy has been seeing and drawing in recent days but his parents dismiss as a nightmare.

Charlie's disappearance baffles the NYPD and tears his parents' marriage apart. Mike devotes all his time to posting flyers, tracking recently paroled predators, and becoming a familiar face at the precinct house of the NYPD officer assigned to the case, Det. Reynolds (Lyriq Bent). Heedless of his own safety, Mike ventures into places where any sane person would fear to go, including what appears to be an abandoned subway tunnel inhabited by the homeless. But graffiti on the wall outside, "Pay the Ghost", reminds Mike of something Charlie said just before he disappeared, and deep underground he encounters a blind man with wild dreadlocks (Stephen McHattie) who seems to know something.

The ultimate solution to Charlie's disappearance involves one of those classic ghost stories of a wronged and unquiet spirit seeking vengeance, whose power is enormous but subject to all sorts of arbitrary "rules" established by—well, who knows? These rules just are, like the rule that you don't feed a Mugwai after midnight. Once Mike stumbles onto a pattern of disappearances, Hannah quickly finds the history that explains it, which somehow no one has ever noticed before. Before we reach that point, both Kristen and Mike have had enough spooky experiences to reunite them, and a psychic (Susannah Hoffmann) has been called in like Tangina Barrons in the original Poltergeist. Her efforts are considerably less successful.

Udel brings off a few tense moments, and some of the effects are effectively spooky, but the camera always has to come back to Cage's Mike, which breaks the illusion. Pay the Ghost needed an everyman at its center, and while Cage can do a lot of things, being an everyman has never been one of them.

Pay the Ghost Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Specific information about the shooting format was not available, but by all indications Pay the Ghost was a digital project. The cinematographer was Sharone Meir (Whiplash). Much of Pay the Ghost occurs in darkened spaces with limited illumination. The visual style is established in the pre-credits sequence in which three unidentified children cower in a colonial cellar, hiding from an unidentified attacker, with only patches of their faces visible. Most of the film's major set pieces occur at night, underground or in some mystical space where light barely penetrates; one brief sequence is deliberately black-and-white.

Image Entertainment's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray offers a satisfying experience overall. Blacks are deep, detail is plentiful (except where it is deliberately obscured by stylization), and the generally muted color scheme accords with the film's somber tone and subject matter. The brightest element in the frame is typically fire, which becomes a visual motif for reasons that become clear as the plot unfolds. Banding and other artifacts were not evident. Image has mastered Pay the Ghost with an average bitrate of 24.99 Mbps.

Pay the Ghost Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Pay the Ghost's 5.1 soundtrack, encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA, has been mixed extremely "hot" and may require you to turn down your usual listening volume by several notches. In the best tradition of Halloween hauntings, the mix tries to scare the viewer with shrieks, roars and other loud noises, some of them from sound effects and some from bursts of instruments in the score by Joseph LoDuca (Army of Darkness). Shrieking vultures are a visual motif in the film, and their shrieks sometimes travel through the surround field. All of the supernatural events have unusual audio signatures, especially the climactic sequence that involves what one might call an inter-dimensional experience. Fortunately, the sonic maelstrom doesn't overwhelm the dialogue, which remains clear and intelligible throughout.

Pay the Ghost Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The disc has no extras. At startup, it plays trailers for Rage and Odd Thomas, which can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are otherwise not available once the disc loads.

Pay the Ghost Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Unlike Rage, another independent Nicolas Cage film released by Image, Pay the Ghost doesn't play off of the actor's past work to create echoes and thereby direct (and sometimes misdirect) audience expectations. It simply plunks the star into a formulaic story and leaves him there. The results are disappointing and forgettable. Suitable for a rental.