Ghost Watch F.T. Movie Review Extra

I have to admit I'm cheating just a wee bit here...Ghost Watch is not a movie, it's an old early nineties (but with late eighties hair) Halloween television special made by the BBC, but to hell with it, I love it, so I'm reviewing it! I remember watching it for the first time when I was like 10 years old on TV. It was Halloween night, It was dark, and I was shitting myself in my parents living room with my younger cousin as we prepared for 'the scary program'. My parents had went to bed early to let us enjoy the show, everyone deserves a good scare on Halloween, right? Well my dad certainly thought so and had concocted an evil plan all of his own when he decided it would be funny as hell to climb out of the bedroom window onto the veranda, all very sneakily and quietly, and burst through the veranda door into the living room.

He had a knife clutched in his hand (a large blunt bread knife, but in the shadows it makes no difference, the effect is the same) and thick black tights over his head...and he was fucking screaming.

I damn near died. My little cousin damn near died. I'm pretty sure someone should have died.

Fuck you dad, you scarred me forever...but damn do you know how to scare the shit out of someone properly! Kudos.


Here may be spoilers....

Ghost Watch   7/10
Michael Parkinson, Sarah Greene, Mike Smith, Craig Charles

the BBC made this awesome paranormal mockumentary back in 1992 on Halloween, and statrted it with a little disclaimer at the beginning...but if you missed the beginning of it, like thousands across Britain did, then you were about to have the absolute shitters put up you as nineties presenting heavyweights Craig Charles, Michael Parkinson, Sarah Greene and Mike Smith lose control of a terrifying situation right in front of our eyes, and the British public find out too late that Haunting's may not stay in their place or origin...and certainly don't like being watched by an eager nation of couch potatoes on Halloween night...

TERROR   4/5

Hapless victim no

Crazy, knife wielding, tight wearing fathers apart, this terrified me when I was younger way more than Jason or Freddy ever did because the people who were presenting it were real people, people who I knew and watched every day on the telly, and yet here they were, smack bang in the middle of a bloody horror movie! It's a little dated now to be completely fair, especially the clothes and the hair (I'm looking at you Mike Smith) but it still gave me little shivers when I watched it recently, with its series of well staged scares and a slow, tension filled build-up that only heightens the craziness of the final 30mins. This was so scary on it's original air date that the BBC were inundated with complaints, and some guy even committed suicide over it, and due to these taintings the remarkable show promptly never seen the light of day for many years to follow. It even knocked back a well deserved Bafta award because the BBC basically wanted to wash it's hands of it at the time. It doesn't really make much sense to me, I'm sure loads of people have killed themselves over Justin Beiber and yet that little shitehole is still on the telly, there's just no justice in the world.. On a little side note, the writers of The Blair Witch Project were supposed to have seen this about a month before they came up with their own movie idea...So basically this low budget, made for television movie is the father of The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, and pretty much anything of that ilk. Does it pay any child support towards it's terrifying children? You bet your ass it doesn't.

Mr. Pipes...apparently...

 GORE   0/5


No gore, only a few minor scratches on a girl's face and tales of a dead dog...well, an alleged dead dog.

This just isn't that type of film though and it relies instead on a steady pace and cliched but well presented scares to frighten the viewer, who needs buckets of blood when you have Mr. Pipes and his army of cats hiding in the Glory Hole? (That last sentence may sound like I've just ingested a shit load of LSD but if you watch the movie, it makes perfect sense, and actually isn't half as perverted as it sounds...).




NUDITY   0/5

It's the BBC in the early nineties man, what's wrong with you?

CHARACTERS / PLOT   4/5

Steven Volk may have just thrown in every horror cliche he could find into the one movie, but boy, he does it with a style and a panache that many other writers could never achieve in an entire career writing horror scripts! It turns out this beast could actually have been scarier to the power of ten but the BBC in all its arsehole wisdom decided to go through the entire first draft of the original script and tstrip out a lot out of scares that it thought might offend the British public...that's right, this is actually the less scary and offensive version of the movie! Some deleted scenes had Michael Parkinson telling the public, in all seriousness, that 'Mr. Pipes may even be in your home now' and Steven Volk had even initially wanted to have a high-pitch sound over the parts of the program where we hear the 'cats in the walls', so that cats and dogs in homes throughout the country would react, and thus scare the shit out of their owners.
Basically if the writer had his full way, this could have been MENTAL.

Seriously...shit got real.

Yes the acting is crap throughout, but rather than drag the story down it actually enforces the realism, these people are presenters, not actors, and they act like they do all the time when we see them on TV...Craig Charles is still an annoying arsehole throughout, Sarah Greene is Smiley and excitable as she always is, and Michael Parkinson is maddeningly unflappable even when the shit hits the fan all around him...just as you would expect him to be.

Is it a masterpiece? Not quite, but for a low budget television program, made by the BBC in the early nineties, it came pretty damn close.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0200659