Ghoster

If you are looking for a good, family friendly movie that you can feel comfortable letting your children watch, then you could do worse than this. Admittedly, it's not going to be winning any awards, but today... that's a good thing. There is no agenda - social or political - whatsoever. It's just good clean fun.

Sure, the acting is a tad corny at times, but remember when being a kid meant that you enjoyed corny? There isn't some deep, philosophical message, either... but remember when movies were just entertainment?

I watched this mainly because it looked like a low-budget Casper flick from the cover photo, but the physical similarity is about as far as that goes. This is a unique story all unto itself that I frankly have never seen.

If you are looking for a fun, family night at the movies... give this a try.

I sat down with my 12 year old son to watch the family adventure movie titled "Ghoster" from writers Nick Pollack, Jerome Reygner-Kalfon and Sebastien Semon. Needless to say that I hadn't even heard about the movie prior to watching it. So I wasn't sure what I was in for here, aside from it being a movie much akin to "Casper" from the movie's synopsis and cover/poster.

Sure, "Ghoster" was watchable for what it turned out to be, but neither my son or I were particularly impressed or overly entertained by director Ryan Bellgardt's 2022 movie. Maybe the storyline was aiming at a younger audience.

The storyline was fair enough, and I am sure that there is a young audience out there for a movie such as this, and they will find much more enjoyment and entertainment in "Ghoster" than we did.

The acting performances in the movie were good. I wasn't familiar with a single actor or actress on the cast list.

Visually then "Ghoster" was okay. Not the most impressive of CGI effects, but the effects served their purposes well enough. And for a family movie, then the CGI effects were adequate enough, as this was not supposed to be scary.

While having sat through the entire movie, then I can honestly say that this is not a movie that I will ever return to watch a second time.

My rating of "Ghoster" lands on a four out of ten stars.

Ghoster is another one of the lower-budget movies Lionsgate puts out with no stars. However, the filmmakers did a great job of stretching the budget! This movie looks really good. The locations and sets are really impressive and there is a bunch of well done cgi/vfx. I am not sure where this was filmed, but the area and buildings just has a great old time feel to it. Sure, this is basically a low budget Casper clone, but Casper came out (checks notes) almost 30 years ago! Kids today are due for a new take on the friendly ghost idea. Overall, this is a cute movie that is well made for the budget. I say it is definitely worth a watch with the kiddos.

Definitely targetted at a young audience of children, who like to watch an only very mildly scary movie, with some ghosts and monsters, so I guess it is suited for the ages of 8,9 years and up.

The story is a typical adventure story, nothing out of the oridinary. The special effects are kinda cheap looking but perhaps young kids wont mind that at all.

Unfortunately this is not a movie which is suited for adults as well, because it is a bit bland and lacking in spark. The leading kid actors arent the most charismatic either.

I would prefer to watch any other classic kid's adventure movie instead of watching this, but this movie will do when there is nothing much else to choose from...

I was surprised to see the Lionsgate logo at the start, because this has everything you would expect from a The Asylum movie.

I don't think this movie even try to hide the fact its a Casper ripoff from the name, the poster, the plot, there is not much originality in there. So i knew what i was gonna watch. Now Casper is almost 30 years old, so its not necessarily a bad thing to have something similar that is new. The issue is everything was done better in Casper and hold up to today standards and is a much better movie still on all front.

The CGI in this is kinda servicable for what its going for. Its clearly not meant to be a realistic movie. But my main issue is there is barely any atmosphere or identity to the movie. For instance when they arrive to the "mansion", we do see a few rooms to show its big, but we barely ever seen anything again of it. Almost every mansion scenes are filmed in broad daylight so you never get that Halloween/Spooky vibe you had in Casper despite being a family movie.

The budget must had been very low. The third act do offer a few more interesting stuff, and a TINY bit of originality but it ain't much.

If you reading this on Letterboxd, i am giving the movie 2.5 Stars because its barely an average movie at best, but i will make an exeption and give it a yellow heart anyway (wich i usually reserve for 3 stars/6 and up) because i can't say i disliked it, it was late at night and i was bored and it "entertained" me enough. The young lead actress was also likable. But note i am someone easy to please when it comes to movies and i am a big of an "adult kid".

But even for young kids, i doubt they will want to return to this movie like i did myself many times with Casper as a kid. Obviously these days you have much more choice and accessibility, wich we didn't in the 90s, but even taking that into consideration.