5.5 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
A professor frantically searches for his son who was abducted during a Halloween carnival.
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Sarah Wayne Callies, Alex Mallari Jr., Veronica Ferres, Lyriq BentHorror | 100% |
Thriller | 44% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH, Spanish
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Slipcover in original pressing
Region A (locked)
Movie | 2.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 0.0 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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