[yasr_overall_rating]
An immortal blues musician terrorizes childhood sweethearts reunited over the Thanksgiving holiday.
I’m a pretty big record collector and I really like “The Ring.” Those might sound like two unrelated statements, but in the course of this film, they work together to make a type of sense.
Mallory (Alicia Underwood) stays at her grandmother’s house while her parents go on vacation and during this time, she gets reacquainted with and gets to know more about Rodney (Justin Duncan). He is a music buff and is who my teenage self would have played in a film. He listens to rare and weird forms of music just to expose himself to a different culture. He’s a strange kid. He’s who I was as a teenager.
Rodney tells Mallory about Eugene Burns, a blues musician who sold his soul to the devil and committed a series of unsolved murders. Anyone who knows this premise knows it is also the urban legend behind how the blues guitarist Robert Johnson allegedly got his talent. There are all very clichéd music stories and ideas, but I’ve never seen them twisted in such a way as to make a horror film.
The connection between these classic blues stories and Mallory is that she accidentally frees Eugene who has been locked away to prevent anyone from getting killed. That’s a neat premise with a good concept, but unfortunately, the film falls (pardon my pun) a little flat.
What prevents “Ghost Note” from working entirely as a film is that the concept doesn’t hold up for a feature film. The directing is fine, the story is fine, but it’s a cross between a director who prefers strangeness over substances and actors who can’t carry their roles for the course of an extended film. I was not surprised to learn that Troy Hart, who directed the film and wrote the screenplay, has only done short films up to this point. I bet he’s an amazingly good director in the short film medium because he has all the marks of someone who is enormously talented in that field. It’s just Hart is ultimately limited in creating all of the nuances that come along with a wonderful feature length movie.
There are also moments throughout where the actors don’t quite have the talent to succeed in carrying the film and make their performances feel a bit forced. They aren’t bad actors by any stretch, I just feel like they’re uncertain about how much of “Ghost Note” is to be played seriously, and how much is supposed to be viewed as a joke.
“Ghost Note” is not a perfect film but it’s remarkably creative and is so peculiar that it is certainly memorable. Like so many titles from Midnight Releasing, “Ghost Note” might not be the best horror movie you’ve ever seen but it’s such a gloriously strange and unique film that you can love it, enjoy it, and watch how some of the weirdest concepts possible translate into film. I’d particularly recommend watching this if you’re a music nut who likes horror films.
Now available on VOD & Digital HD
