The Orchard
Hey, I’ve got nothing against indie comedies. Napoleon Dynamite was a big thing of its time, and I adored the ridiculous British crime comedy Snatch. But I do expect to be entertained and not be bored. I don’t need big set pieces or important messages or even neverending hilarity. Just be good, please.
Ghost Team is a small movie from writer-director Oliver Irving, and it’s mostly directed fine. The script though is quite dull, and better direction could’ve pepped things up. In the movie we follow a group of small town misfits, led by head misfit Louis (Jon Heder, doing nothing interesting). David Krumholtz is his suicidal best friend Stan, Justin Long is way too confident security guard Ross, and Amy Sedaris is a tired old fake psychic. She seemed legitimately tired though, not just as a character.
Melonie Diaz plays Ellie, a love interest. That’s all really. And there’s also Zak (Paul W. Downs), a jerk. So Louis is bored in his small town of nothing, but like everyone in the movie (one of the few amusing recurring gags) he’s obsessed with a ghost hunting fake reality show “Ghost Getters,” which has a few funny clips. Looking for a thrill in his mundane life, he finds out about a “haunted” abandoned house and decides to gather a team to check it out.
The first forty or so minutes is a dull affair of sort of setting up these characters, but there’s a lot of unfunny conversation meant to be dry “humor.” Perhaps the movie’s too smart for me, but I didn’t get it. Eventually things get a bit more interesting and then very quickly peters out. As the mysteries get solved, the movie gets conventional in an uninteresting way that’s meant to be thrilling and subversively ironic. Again, maybe I just don’t get it.
The ending annoyed me.
I liked David Krumholtz and his alien obsessed character juxtaposed with the other supernatural stuff; you usually don’t get aliens and ghosts in the same idea space. I think there are snippets of good stuff here in a possibility but the movie doesn’t get there. It’s awfully twee and “indie” in that pretentiously slow way. I wanted something funnier, even from the dry humor here. I wanted more interesting, quirky characters. These were too milquetoast.
The movie itself, is just too bland.
Planning to see Ghost Team? Click on the image below to see the movie, and be sure to come back and tell us what you thought!
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