The Mystery of Spoon River

I Know I Love Pizza... I Know I Don't Like Coffee... I Know I Think I Like this Movie...

There is so much here. Maybe too much. Maybe not enough. Maybe it should have been a 6 hour miniseries or maybe a TV series along the lines of 'Twin Peaks'. It is based on a little known, but critically acclaimed book. I've watched this film four times and each time I have picked up more minutiae. More subtle things that are linked and that make the story more appealing.

The film is about many things... A mysterious death. Simple midwest farm community life. Midnight racism. Ghosts and a long forgotten cemetery. Family history. In the end, it is about coming home.

This film is NOT for everyone. Many will not like it or see the subtle depth it has. It will, however, treat those who 'get it' to a hidden little gem.

During this film, I mostly laughed! But this was not supposed to be a comedy. I am not sure how a half cocked plot like this even gets the funding to be put on film. Keeping in mind that Ghost's is not a big budget movie, but a bargain bin cast in the back woods of Central Illinois... I still have a hard time giving it a break. Bad Acting, Poor Plot, plus some racial and social stereotyping that have to be seen to be believed. All contribute to making this film barely watchable. There were a few special effects that surprised me with good quality.

If your favorite movies are in the Genre of "Mystery Science Theatre" fare... Then this is your movie. Otherwise, go rent Blaire Witch again, and see how far decent acting, and a good plot can take a low budget movie.

This movie tries to do too much and does nothing very well. It's supposed to be a ghost story, but maybe it's a commentary on racial prejudice, or, yet again, it's a story of coming home again, or let's try unrequited love, or a murder mystery? Which is it? Who cares. Don't waste 93 minutes of your life on this.

A big-city lawyer is called home to defend a local man accused of murder.

This movie is something of a lie. Called either the "mystery" of Spoon River or the "ghost" of Spoon River, it seems to project itself as either a thriller or something supernatural, and it is neither. If you are watching this for a horror film, you will be sadly fooled.

But even if you watch it for the "right" reasons (whatever those might be), trying to pin it down is hard to do. Is it historical? A drama? A commentary on race? Perhaps a comedy, as the police in the beginning are rather funny. Nobody really seems to know, and you end up with a mush of lumpy, uneven film.

There seems to be something good in here. Or maybe a lot of good, but all working in different directions. I would call this a misfire.

This is a low budget indie movie so I will cut it some slack. But its heart was in the right place though most of the writing & acting was just lame.

It involved some town that was haunted by ghosts of the Civil War, the KKK & others so it could be classified as a supernatural thriller with some social commentary. But there were just too many jarring elements to it. First off, it starts out promising with a couple of good old boys going raccoon hunting at night. The next day a woman driving a harvester finds scoops up a dead game warden, who we can't even tell he was a black man at first. So the local TV crew comes, some vain phony newscaster woman who when the sheriff says the game warden was killed by some coon, as in the animal, hunters, she spins it as a racially motivated murder. Then all hell breaks lose, but we never even see any of the local cops saying, "Wait a minute, we never said there was anything racial" That part could have been developed more as a sensationalist media angle. Then a big city female lawyer comes, because one of the hunters who has been charged with murder, was her old boyfriend. Even though their guns didn't match the bullet they pulled out of the dead man, and there were no witnesses, that doesn't seem to be enough to get him off the hook, especially when his hunting buddy spazes out on the lawyer and FBI agents.

Okay, it went on like this for a while, spirits exacting revenge on live Klansmen and others as our intrepid female lawyer lead finds out the town's dark secrets, while getting lambasted herself for being some soul-less big city lawyer sell out.

It could have been so much better if they just polished the script up a bit and focused on the core story. It was adapted from a book of the same name so they must have just thrown as much as they could in. But when one of the major plot elements revolved around some guy accidentally shooting himself dead with some 140 year old black powder Civil War revolver he found laying in the woods, yeah, think it out better!