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The Ghosts of Edendale, 2003, directed by
Stephan Avalos. Paula Ficara, Stephen Wastell, Andrew Quintero, Keith Fulton,
Louis Pepe, .
Synopsis: A young couple seeking a new start to their lives moves into a neighborhood built on top of the site where Tom Mix's ranch/studio once resided. Rachel is a former model seeking a fresh career as a screenwriter; she has a history of...seeing things...and she hopes a new environment will clear her head. Kevin aspires to write the great American screenplay. The neighborhood seems ideal. All of their neighbors seem to be involved in the film buisiness in some capacity. Unfortunately, there is a darker side to their new environs. Kevin becomes obsessed with the screenplay he's writing, a western, while Rachel's muse has dried up. Soon, Kevin is having "meetings" about his movie, while Rachel is plagued by increasingly frightneing visions. The ghosts of Edendale are ready for their big comeback... The premise behind The Ghosts of Edendale is brilliant. It's only a short step from the living ghosts of, say, Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (who could forget the gallery of decrepit, once-famous faces playing cards in Norma Desmond's crumbling mausoleum?) to this conflation of The Shining and Hollywood Babylon. The fact that Tom Mix did indeed once have a studio ranch where the present film is set is almost too good for a creative horror scenarist to screw up. Particularly if that scenarist happens to live there, as writer/director Stephan Avalos does. Avalos, you might recall, was the creator of The Last Broadcast, a film that gained notoriety as a sort of ur-Blair Witch Project. Like The Last Broadcast, The Ghosts of Edendale is a kitchen sink project, a microbudget calling card intended to get Avalos in the door for better things (this seems to be working, given that this film has been picked up for distribution by Warner Brothers). Like The Last Broadcast, the film is satisfying for what it is: a brilliant premise compromised by severely limited resources. As is often the case with microbudget, DIY cinema, allowances have to be made... Avalos and his collaborators have done what they can with their resources, and props to them. The filmmaking itself never seems like the work of amateurs. The structure of the screenplay is sound, even if it seems to exist at second hand. Scott Hale's CGI effects that bring their ghosts to...well..".life" are surprisingly good for a movie on this scale. I couldn't help but think back to The Devil's Backbone, a film that demonstrated fairly conclusively that "good special effects" are no longer the exclusive domain of Hollywood's big-studio hegemony. The performances by a cast of the director's friends and accquaintances are less good, and the screenplay does the actors no favors by leaving awkward gaps that a more seasoned troupe would be able to fill with bits of business. The dead spaces in the performance have a time-dilation effect (I call this "bad movie time," an effect that makes the film seem longer than it is and brings to mind Ambrose Bierce's definition of a novel as "a short story, padded"). Avalos is at his worst when dealing with actors, both in choosing his line readings and with his blocking of the film frame itself, though in his defense, it's entirely possible that his blocking is dictated by the limits of his equipment and the necessity of filming in an actual house rather than a purpose-built set. This is a common problem with films made on DV. Filming on High Definition Digital Video is the film's most serious failing. The hard-edged crispness of the image--that intangible quality of the image that makes even the most advanced DV productions look vaguely like a soap opera--undermines the film's attempts to build atmosphere. The setting doesn't generate menace, as any haunted house--even one in suburbia--ought to do. I'll own up to my own prejudices about the digital revolution right here: DV still isn't ready for the big time. It may never be ready. I still haven't seen a movie made on DV that wouldn't have been better on film. Realistically, though, I recognize that the film itself might not exist at all if film was the only option. We are in the dark ages of digital. What rescues the film is the premise itself. The premise of a screenplay being "ghostwritten" by actual ghosts who are tailoring it to their own big comeback just tickles me. I wish I had thought of it. Do I wish the execution were better? Of course, but there are plenty of bigger horror movies that don't have even so much as a fraction of the wit behind this movie. And that's nothing to sneeze at... |