Directed by Rachel Talalay
Starring Karen Allen, Chris Mulkey and Ted Marcoux
I can still remember the commercials for this movie. 10-year-old Lick Ness Monster had just discovered the Friday the 13th series and was in the midst of watching the HBO-recorded lent copy of Watchers something like 77 times when the nonstop barrage of ads started. You can't run, you can't hide, you can't win. That was the dialogue elivered in the freaky-deaky electronic voice by this flick's villain, and suffice to say, it all seemed very intriguing to a slightly losery, more-than-slightly nerdy fourth grader. Lo and behold, a year later, I made sure to catch the flick when it aired on HBO. Thus concludes this week's epic introductory story.
Back then, I really liked the film. It could have been the worst movie ever and I would have forced myself to like it given the insane amount of hype that I had given it in my own brain. Alas, the years since haven't been too kind to Ghost in the Machine, and that's a damn shame, because there's some talented people involved in the production. First and foremost is Rachel Talalay, a woman who rose up through the ranks of the Freddy Krueger films and eventually got to kill the bastard off once and for all. We've also got Karen Allen of Indiana Jones fame (one awesome movie, one insanely crappy one) and deliverer of some '80s movie nude scenes that got me through some lonely nights back in college. Too much information? Perhaps. That should be enough background information. Let's get to it.
Remember Wes Craven's Shocker, where a serial killer is able to transmogrify himself into the world of electronic beings just before he gets the chair? Well, this movie basically takes that motif and repeats it verbatim, only this time, it occurs before the human characters are able to ascertain the dude's identity. The opening chapters of the film introduce us to Karl Hochman, relatively mild-mannered skeevy dude by day and vicious serial killer by night who has a definitive MO. The press in their infinite wisdom have dubbed him the "Address Book Killer" due to his propensity to - you guessed it - steal people's address books and conduct his mass murder sprees from said books. For what it's worth, Ted Marcoux does a decent enough job as Hochman, although he's nowhere cose to Mitch Pileggi's menace in Shocker. I swear that is the last I'll compare these two films. As hokey as Craven's half-hearted attempt at re-starting ANOES for the TV generation was, it's still loads better than anything we get here.
Setup time - early in the film, Hochman managed to steal relatively likable (how's that for a lazy character description?) Terry Munroe's address book, mere minutes of screen time before he is almost killed by an oncoming truck in one of the funnier examples of "derp"-ness displayed on celluloid for all to enjoy. Minutes after that, we get the aforementioned transmogrification scene where Hochman's essence is transported into the land of electronics, where the now demonic and very, very ghostly Hochman goes about killing everyone that Terry knows.
A good portion of the movie focuses on Terry Munroe, and while Karen Allen is indeed more than game for the part, the character unfortunately falls short when compared to even average horror movie heroines. It really didn't matter how well Karen allen portrayed Terry Munroe; given some of the material we're given in this flick, Meryl Streep herself could have flown in from London (I think - I can't be bothered to look it up) and induced large degrees of insomnia. There is admittedly a pretty long sequence in the middle of this film as everyone Terry knows is offed in pretty damn creative ways. My personal favorite is the bit where a hapless dude gets his face burned off by a supercharged hair dryer, a scene that made me turn away when I first saw the movie and still qualifies as cringe-worthy to this day. Unfortunately, a lot of these characters are complete, utter nonentities, making this a kind of Friday the 13th Part V over the electrowebz.
There really isn't a whole lot more to be said about this movie. Really, you should know where it's going by now, anyway. Terry, along with help from her somewhat doofusy son and a cool computer hacker (and watching this movie will remind you of the days when this character was present in every movie that involved this fancy little thing called COMPUTERS), get into a big scrum with Hochman, leading to a thrilling conclusion and somewhat ambiguous ending. Been there, done that, and in 1993, it felt like even more been there, done that than the usual. Thus it is with Ghost in the Machine. As a ten year old, it felt really fresh to me, and combined with the movie's slick advertising campaign, it was coolness personified. 20-some years later, it's barely passable at best.
* 1/2 out of ****. Some fleeting moments of good acting aren't enough to cover up a multitude of story sins.
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