Lady In White (1986)

I recall my mum suggesting I turn this off if it was too scary and I remember thinking how ridiculous she was being given it was just a silly ghost story with some cool special effects, but of course I was a child and rewatching this today I discover the fun supernatural romp of my 80s past actually tells a deeply disturbing story of a child serial rapist and killer and features among other distinctly adult things child murder, suicide, upskirting, masturbation, hideous unchecked racism from the mouths of children, an assassination, and while it features a not very satisfactory plot, you have to be impressed at the way director Frank LaLoggia manages to hide a supernatural psycho thriller for adults inside a Goonies-style adventure for kids and vice versa.

★★☆☆☆ (the psycho thriller for adults)

★★★☆☆ (the ghost story for kids)

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The Forest (2018)

While Japan tries to desensationalise the number of suicides that take place in the Aokigahara Forest at the foot of Mount Fuji so that less people feel encouraged to go there for this purpose and more want to go there as tourists to enjoy its expanses of still, quiet volcanic forest, the likes of Youtuber Logan Paul and the makers of this bad taste 2016 movie (just another relegated to the Netflix dross heap for undiscerning couch potatoes to watch and justify their subscriptions) insensitively turn Japan's grim problem, one attributed not to ghost-fed paranoia but to the country's social austerity, isolation and unemployment, into clickbait.

★☆☆☆☆

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Ghost Ship (1952)

Rumours of a ghost don't stop a couple from buying a ship but after their crew members flee their jobs, the couple hire a paranormal investigator whose arrival on board the ship marks the point this low-budget nautical thriller becomes really, really scar...ily bad - none of the actors has any choice but to bear with stoic faces the paranormal investigator's awful explanations and the acting from that point becomes more wooden and more hollow than the ship's hull. 

★★☆☆☆

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Winchester (2018)

The many nods to Hammer Film Productions - the lead named 'Dr Price' who looks like Vincent Price, the florrid red titlecard hanging over a gothic house - feel less like a homage to 70s horror than a pre-emptive plea for viewers not to take the daft Winchester Mystery House caper too seriously, which is wise, because the film is riddled with illogic: sealed rooms with secret entrances, thirteen nailed doors and thirteen hooked passages that fail as ghost repellents anyway; an anti-gun theme that ends up resolved with gunfire; and finally, the baffling suggestion the whole may result from an earthquake?!

★★★☆☆

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Ghostbusters (1984)

It is hard to imagine, despite decades of advances in cinema technology and the various sequels and reboots that started with the Melissa McCarthy one in 2016, that anyone is ever going to improve upon this classic 80s comedy - even rewatching it today, so many years after its initial release in 1984, it impresses with its special effects and comedy, and Bill Murray is in top form as the drily hilarious Dr Peter Venkman who, with his fellow Ghostbusters, takes on New York's growing number of paranormal problems including the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

★★★★★

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Personal Shopper (2016)

The viewers most likely to get something out of this monotonous ghost story slash new-gen existential drama with fleeting murder mystery are teen Twilight fans, slightly older now than they were when Kristen Stewart was romanced by vampires and werewolves but still sporting their multimedia-enhanced attention-spans that enable them to deal with Personal Shopper's flux of unfinished ideas, and who, like the main character, experience a lot of the world alone with eyes trained on a screen, expressing their emotions primarily via emoticons - "I'm scared," "I'm ashamed," Maureen (Kristen Stewart's anachronistically-named psychic personal-shopper) punches into her phone during a text exchange that makes up a boring bulk of the film (an exchange she has with a ghost or a murderer or herself or someone else...stop asking questions) but despite these texted e-motions, Maureen never looks scared nor ashamed nor anything else: her scowl and low affect go unchanged for the duration of the movie - she is neither happy nor sad, here nor there; she is always in transit, between worlds, like the twenty-somethings who might, like, deign to hit LIKE on social media in response to all this more-mature-Twilight supernatural angst.

★☆☆☆☆

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Scary Movie 2 (2001)

The especially sober moments in this laugh-free horror movie spoof are any of the scenes featuring Chris Evans as the repulsive-looking manservant of a haunted house, and the scenes in which the homosexuality of Shawn Wayans' character is repeatedly offered up sans comedic effort because apparently this is a hilarious thing in itself.

☆☆☆☆☆ (No stars)

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The Orphanage (El Orfanato) (2007)

Belen Rueda, who is so good in thrillers (for instance, Julia's Eyes), loans her weight to this slightly cheesy but perfectly entertaining Guillermo del Toro-endorsed gothic mystery with all the trappings: a creaky mansion by the sea that was once an orphanage, caves, pasty orphans in leg-braces playing nursery games, hidden rooms, ghosts, paranormal investigators, skeletons and treasure hunts.

★★★☆☆ 

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The Lovely Bones (2009)

Like Patrick Swayze's Sam in Ghost, the girl in this movie moves into a limbo state after her murder, but unlike Sam in Ghost, her limbo (a dreamlike state like in The Cell) has no narrative purpose: while her presence is felt by her family members, it does nothing to help their investigation into her disappearance, and with no real connection to the events of the film, her limbo and her particularly daft Oda Mae Brown moment towards the movie's end are meaningless gimmicks in a long mystery-free drama about an absurd trap-building serial killer.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Conjuring 2 (2016)

The Amityville murders are referenced, the Warrens head to London, and that and the fact Lorraine is reluctant to continue her and her husband's old-school ghostbusting are what distinguish this second outing from the first one -- everything else is so familiar you'll catch yourself checking to see if it isn't in fact the one you've already watched: the Warrens bang on locked doors, tout Christian faith, are struck occasionally with supernatural apoplexy, and again fail to answer any of those nagging questions you have about inhuman spirits - why do they sometimes drift across corridors, at other times move as a shadow across walls, and at other times again choose to only appear in reflective surfaces?

★★★☆☆

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Ghostbusters (2016)

It is serviceable and on a few occasions nostalgically recalls the classic by way of cameos and great ghost effects, and it doesn't matter that the men have been replaced by women and vice versa - what matters is this is a too cartoony, childish exercise constructed without the original's connection to time and place, and has more product placement than ghosts lurking in a story about as complex as a themepark ride.

★★☆☆☆

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Ghost (1990)

It is often said of this hit romantic ghost story that Whoopi Goldberg steals the show playing Oda Mae Brown, a not-so-fake psychic, but in fact the whole cast - including Patrick Swayze as Sam, an all-round good guy murdered early on who tries as a ghost to solve the mystery of his death, and Demi Moore as Molly, his heartbroken lover - is so winning and likeable that it too, along with the movie's special effects and great humour, makes this a romantic, suspenseful, funny and only occasionally cloying romp.

★★★★☆

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Ghostbusters II (1989)

Apparently not even Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, the writers, thought Ghostbusters II was a good idea - it was never going to improve upon the original - but as far as studio-driven money-grabbing sequels go, it is pretty fun: like a Lethal Weapon sequel, the cast has grown and so things are busier - Dana has a baby, for one, and there are several new characters standing between the Ghostbusters and the city mayor, and Louis Tully has been adopted into the Ghostbusters' circle, so his role of goofball demigod conduit is handed over to newcomer Peter MacNichol who plays a very Rick Moranis-ish 'Igor' assistant to the evil Vigo - when their evil plot requires a loan of Sigouney Weaver's baby, the Ghostbusters get their proton packs back on.

★★★☆☆

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Just Like Heaven (2005)

Sandwiched by a terrible first and really terrible last fifteen minutes is a likeable romcom, a role-reversed The Ghost and Mrs Muir, which teams up a ghost with the man now living in her apartment - they bicker at first but eventually work together to find out who she is (was) and why she isn't outright dead as a doornail.

★★★☆☆

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The Sixth Sense (1999)

The spooky thriller that momentarily shot director M Night Shyamalan and child star Haley Joel Osment to fame features Toni Collette as the mother of a troubled boy (Osment) who sees dead people, Bruce Willis as the child psychologist trying to help, and a now famous twist in the movie's tail.

★★★★☆

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The Conjuring (2013)

James Wan, director of Insidious, a 2010 horror starring Patrick Wilson about a family terrorised by demons, brings us The Conjuring, a 2013 horror starring Patrick Wilson about a family terrorised by demons, but while Insidious was dopey, this is an effective, tighter version of the regurgitated story.

★★★★☆

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Insidious (2010)

A dopey demon possession story that has nowhere to go except to get increasingly silly, with Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson playing parents of an incessantly crying infant and a possessed boy, all of them helpless in a whirlwind of opening and closing doors, banging furniture, and the most insidious thing, boredom.

★★☆☆☆

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