The hard part of playing catch up in writing these reviews is especially poignant in a situation like this. Last night we watched Zoopocalypse which I was happy to say nice things about. It was a fun movie that my kids enjoyed and it worked out well. Tonight we found ourselves in a similar position. After making a homemade pizza and our take on a Pizza Hut 2010’s dessert option they unfortunately retired many years ago, the Hershey’s Chocolate Dunkers, it was both later than we wanted it to be and still needed to pop on a Halloween title that we could all enjoy. I once again tested the waters with a few PG-13 titles. I watched the trailer for “Maggie” with Arnie and Abigail Breslin which is a horror drama about having to deal with a daughter who has been infected in a zombie outbreak. It seems like a bit of a slow burn into madness and the parental struggle with navigating the ins and outs of dealing with the toll it will take. We didn’t make it through the trailer. I may still revisit that one myself. I will admit that the zombie aspect didn’t do anything major for me. But it’s at least something a little different from an aged Schwarzenegger that I might appreciate in certain respects. But the horror aspect was not one that my youngest was really in the mood for and as I said with last night’s movie, I’m going to respect that. I may push the envelope a little with something I know is more of an edgy thriller but anything that’s going to have real horror elements is not something I’m in the mood to force on anyone not ready for it, especially my kids. I had “Ghost Squad” kind of tucked away in my back pocket as I think I came across it maybe a week or so ago. It could have been longer but the time of discovery was not important really. It’s that this movie is clearly one for the whole family. So once I knew we weren’t going to land on a legitimately spooky movie tonight, I accepted my fate and turned on “Ghost Squad”.
I’m not really sure where to age this movie. It’s about middle schoolers but I have two middle schoolers here with me and they made fun of it almost the entire time. I don’t think it necessarily is just one of those goofy ones that skews more towards that 7/8/9ish crowd who actively look up to middle schoolers and think they’re cool. I’ve watched a lot of those Disney and Nickelodeon shows about tweens and teens that are over the top silly and even those have some measure of redemption here and there. Production value is at least present in those. The actuality of things here is that I just don’t know who this movie was made to entertain. Maybe no one. It’s not that it’s ridiculously bad, it’s just not good either. It feels kind of like an episode of an afternoon spooky comedy show on a kids network from the 90’s that just went on too long. Like if there was a really boring episode of Goosebumps that lasted an hour and a half but never really did anything. That’s the problem with this movie, there’s no real point. At least not one that has any appeal beyond the lamest 7th graders in the world.
The Ghost Squad almost seems like if you took the Three Ninjas and removed all the cool parts of them and then made them smart-adjacent and interested in ghosts, I think? I’m still a little confused by that whole part. Like in The Monster Squad, they’re clearly interested in monsters. I don’t think these kids are interested in ghosts. In fact, most of the movie they seem terrified at the potential for ghosts to exist. So it feels like a really inappropriate name for whatever it is that these kids are supposed to represent at the end of everything. The family dynamics aren’t interesting or compelling. It’s not until the end of the movie that anyone is even close to actually likable when you get right down to it. Kevin Nealon is the only name that stands out and up until the last 10 minutes of the movies, I wasn’t even 100% sure these kids were even his. He certainly didn’t seem to like either one of them. It was a real thing. He was a pretty huge tool as a dad. Combined with us having to figure out if Todd, Charlie’s sibling, was a boy or a girl, this movie was tough to decipher very early on in the “plot”.
What it boils down to is Charlie, Nick, and the tall kid are all losers. There’s a footbally kid and his two dumbass friends who seem to enjoy giving Charlie a hard time. Really, I’d have turned all these kids over to Jigsaw at the start of the movie and gone to get a sub sandwich and been fine with it all. But there’s that classic showdown where the older bullies are putting it to these middle schoolers and Charlie decides to stand up for the group by running his mouth to the football kid with the backwards hat. Normally you’d stay in your lane with a kid who wears his hat backwards. That’s the improper direction to be wearing a hat. You can easily see that rules, decorum, and social adherence to norms and maxims is out the window with a young man of such bold rebellion. But Charlie stands his ground and challenges the older boys openly. They determine that if Charlie is serious about showing off his brave nature they he and his Ghost Squad needs to stay overnight on Halloween at the Old Sullivan House. Charlie accepts the terms by asking him “When and where??” rather boldly. It’s a little unfortunate that Football boy clearly already stated the where so his clever little retort was a bit lopsided. But the kids work out the logistics and end up camping out in this big, old, scary house. Surely hijinx will ensue.
Long story short, they kind of do. Not in an interesting way. But the kids all go and make their way into the old scary house and set up shop. Good thing tall kid brought frozen dinners. This is one of those things that does bug me about movies like this. I have a 7th grader. If he was going to a sleepover and he needed to bring food with him for the overnight, there’s no way he asks for something out of the freezer. Certainly not a TV dinner. I just object to the premise that kids are so stupid that Jokes like these really do land ever. Or that they should. There’s just an element about it that I don’t care for because it feels like we’re talking down to kids in these instances and we shouldn’t. I know middle schoolers are an unruly and hard to manage group of kids. They will do and say some truly idiotic things. But I don’t think this behavior needs celebrating. And that’s not necessarily to imply that’s what this movie was doing, per se. But it’s easy to see that they had no real intention of dealing with the children competently. I think this is why movies like The Goonies have lived on for decades. It showed that kids could be scared and kids could be goofy but kids could also be legitimate problem solvers and adventurers and heroes. In the end, they did champion the kids to a degree, but it was through a labyrinth of ridiculous plot twists and turns and poorly shot scenes. They made some measure of an attempt at story arcs, character development, and conflict resolution but in the end it just didn’t come together in any meaningful kind of fashion and the kids all just felt flat which was too bad.
I think you can take a story like this and really turn it into something you can enjoy if you deal with it a little more honestly. Middle schoolers can definitely identify with dealing with bullies. Parents can be comedically tuned out but I don’t see what’s so bad about painting kids like these as having parents who actually care about their kids wellbeing. I think you can give them real voices who comment about their lives in real, meaningful ways. It’s entirely possibly in my estimation. Now you’re not going to pull this off with any set of age appropriate actors. It’s clear this isn’t a booming aspect of the industry because there just aren’t the people to make these films in my estimation. I get it to a degree. I’m not the primary audience. But I am the secondary, at least in some ways. I’m the Kevin Nealon in real life to this movie. But there’s nothing stereotypical about my kids. And I think that’s what movies like this really lack. They make all the characters some kind of caricature of their archetype, write crappy dialogue with half hearted attempts at emotional settings. Middle schoolers are not deep, meaningful people that are underrepresented in a fitting perspective. But they are real people figuring out life through trial and error in a growing dynamic that impacts them in actual ways. There’s commentary to be discovered and space to move and grow. It doesn’t have to be poorly written slapstick. It doesn’t have to be overtly dramatic tripe. But I think the thing is too few folks really take the time to either remember what life was like in that span of time or care to endeavor to listen to what kids go through to help tell their stories. Any way you slice it, the bones of something real were there in this story. But the writing, acting and direction were all phoned in so it just didn’t hit.
It’s not the worst movie I’ve ever seen. So I do maintain that the critique of that nature really should be reserved for truly bad films. This wasn’t all that entertaining at the end of the day. We went from position A to position B in a linear progression. Things happened, then other things occurred and then the movie ended. That’s really all you can say about a movie like this. It wasn’t good. It was far from enjoyable so I can’t go past the 5 mark in any responsible fashion. It’s probably a high 3 or a low 4. I feel most comfortable with a 3.9. I don’t think it really crosses the boundaries into 4 territory at the end of the film. It’s hollow, dumb, lifeless and poorly executed. But that’s a lot of stuff if you really break it down. I think this is a pretty simple throw away movie that a lot of kids would probably lazily consume on their own tablets chilling out one weekend afternoon. If you had this title sitting in an “approved” section of movies for kids to watch, they’d probably eventually pick it up and watch it. Some kinds would probably even laugh. Thankfully my kids had more fun making fun of it in the end. Not that their tastes in film are so elevated that this does serve as something left to be desired. They just noticed all the cracks in the presentation relatively easily and mocked it accordingly. This movie probably does actively skew younger. I’d imagine the 7/8/9 crowd would probably find this one entertaining. So we might have all outgrown a movie like this unfortunately. But we made it through and we all had a good time which is all that I can ask for. It makes me happy to know that I’m raising a next generation of MST3K literate youngin’s that can identify a subpar film easily and then deal with it in the best way you can, relentlessly tearing it to shreds by your own stinging commentary. This movie is ripe for that. But it served it’s purpose tonight. So I’ll take it. We’re getting close to that final week of spooky flicks so I think we may be close to done with the necessity for family friendly films beyond this point. We may have one or two more that rear their ugly little faces and I hope in the meantime I can track down a couple more that are worth a watch. This one did not fit that category in the end. So until next time, I’ll catch you on the flip side.
