I am a Ghost
Questions for Mike:
- Did you like either one of these two movies?
- Did you get why I asked you to watch “A Ghost Story” while you were watching “I am a Ghost?”
- Was the performance of lead actress Anna Ishida acceptable or was she too rough for you to buy into the character’s plight?
- How about that voice-over? For me, it was the biggest misstep in what I found to be a really interesting watch.
- Was the repetition too much for you? I think it walked the razor’s edge when it came to being too much, pulling back and changing up just in time before I went to shut it off.
Bottom Five no/low budget movies:
So a bit about this weird little area of the enormous film world: to most people, almost everything under a certain budget is unwatchable. Whether because of amateurish acting, poor cinematography, crap sets, slapdash editing, nonexistent direction, or horrifically inept writing, there’s a lot most movie goers would find unpalatable about low/no-budget cinema. This is largely because people are used to movies made for millions upon millions of dollars – there’s a certain level of inherent competence that comes with that amount of money. I used to call it “cinematic grammar,” but essentially, movies that hit theaters typically follow a rhythmic pattern, have shots composed in a certain way and generally FEEL like “real” movies. So when they watch even five minutes of a no-budget flick made for thousands, perhaps even hundreds of dollars, they say things like “my kids could do better than this” or “this is worse than a high school AV club” or “this is the worst thing I have ever seen.”
Well, for several years I was part of a micro budget, shot on video revolution and let me tell you, there are plenty of terrific flicks made with next to no money or professional resources. In fact, I would go as far as to say that when you watch as much stuff as I have that was made on a thread of a shoestring budget, you start to get very forgiving of the technical deficiencies, the line fumbles and the poor camera placement. And instead of kicking these movies while they’re down, you start noticing what it is they did right and applauding them for it.
That’s what I did with “I am a Ghost.” It’s what I did with many other movies made on the cheap like Miguel Coyula’s “Red Cockroaches,” Scooter McCrae’s “Shatter Dead,” or Eric Thornett’s “Shockheaded,” which honestly are among the very best microcinema flicks I have ever seen.
So when you have an eye toward forgiveness, making a list of the worst cheapo movies is… challenging. And what it all comes down to for me is INTENTION. My list is all about the dearth of any real artistic merit, and instead the full-on embrace of making a quick buck. Each of these films – or series of films – were made for nothing, look like it, and also have zero soul, zero merit, and zero worth. They’re not worthy of saying much about at all, so unlike many of our previous bottom five lists, I’ve said a lot up front so I’ll have to say relatively little about there cinematic turds loosed from a bunch of assholes who either lost their artistic integrity or simply never had any to begin with.
- The Bikini Bloodbath series – yes there’s more than one of something called “Bikini Bloodbath.” No you don’t need to ever, EVER watch any of them. From Jonathan Gorman and Thomas Edward Seymour, these shot on video endurance tests are scant on every single quality needed for a movie to be called a movie. The company is called “Blood Bath” pictures, so… there’s that.
- Anything by Jim Wynorski under the pseudonym of HR or Harold Blueberry, Sam Pepperman, Salvadore Ross
- Just about every movie by New Jersey’s Seduction Cinema.
- Charles Band’s output post 2000
- The Faces of Death series – John Alan Schwartz’s cash grab of gross ineptitude and zero taste.
Staff Pick: Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel – 2021 – Joe Belinger
Joe Berlinger has been kicked around a good amount for his much-loathed “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2″ movie that tried, and apparently failed miserably, to follow up the found-footage phenomenon of The Blair Witch Project.”
But his career as a documentary filmmaker has led to a great deal of accolades including an Academy Award nomination, 8 Emmy nominations, and a Emmy and Peabody Award win. The guy is no slouch.
And while he could have phoned-in the 2021 true-crime documentary “The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel,” an installment of Netflix’s “Crime Scene” series which Berlinger oversees, this story about a young Asian-Canadian woman going missing after a stay in a notorious skid-row hotel in LA is as thoughtful as it is twisty.
It’s also incredibly eerie, as Berlinger is working with a creeptastic pot-o-gold when it comes to this story’s biggest draw, the elevator video of the missing woman – Elisa Lam – acting very, very weird and how that was the last anyone ever saw of her before she disappeared.