Ghost Machine (2009)

Charming and brutal

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

All I knew about "Ghost Machine" prior to sitting down to watch it was that it was allegedly a horror movie.But it turned out to be a very boring horror movie, and with little emphasis on the horror part.I managed to endure 45 minutes of the ordeal that turned out to be "Ghost Machine", before I threw in the towel and gave up. I must admit that I gave up out of sheer and utter boredom. There was just nothing interesting the entire 45 minutes that I watched, and nothing to spur me to watch the rest of the movie now.It should be said that they actually had adequate production value to the movie. Just a shame that the movie was killed off by having a horribly boring storyline that offered nothing of any interest. And it is the production value alone that manages to ensure that I am rating the movie three out of ten stars.The acting in the movie, well for the 45 minutes that I managed to sit through, was adequate although not anything in the outstanding department."Ghost Machine" came and left without leaving a lasting impression, and I can't recommend that you waste your time or money on this.

The basic plot: a group of soldiers and their gamer buddies play a haunted video game, where if you die in the game, you die for real.I didn't have high expectations for a movie titled Ghost Machine, and, when I read the synopsis, I lowered my expectations even further. If all you're looking for is a cheesy, derivative movie that looks like a video game, then I'm sure you'll be satisfied. Otherwise, I'd say you should avoid it, because it's only going to annoy you.The writing was a bit stupid, but any bad writing was dwarfed by the monumentally bad idea of a haunted video game. The acting and special effects were alright. There's a bit of gore, titillation, implied torture, and an attempted rape. If the story had focused on these elements, instead of recreating a generic console game, maybe this would have been a better movie... but I kind of doubt it.

I watched it last night on Netflix instant streaming. Acting was good and I like watching Rachel Taylor, but script was too much like the Matrix. There is a software and you get plugged in and live in a virtual world, but there is a creepy woman who was abused and want to kill everyone. We don't know anything about her except she was a terrorist and was sexually abused by a sleezy top rank officer. So now she wants revenge. Cinematography was very good and so was music, but script was just so average. Same gun toting military search for a bad person and one by one they get killed. I've seen it so many times before. well, if you have absolutely nothing else to watch, then this movie would suffice, but look for something else first, unless like me, you wanted to see Rachel Taylor.

I've learned there are few things more annoying than German horror films (when they're made in English, anyway). But this low budget affair isn't much better. I suppose I should give it some credit...usually it takes four or five awful sequels for a horror movie to put it's killer into a computer (or space...that works too). For proof of this see: Hellraiser and/or Friday The 13th. Some movies attempt to skip right over this and pretty much universally fail. See also: Lawnmower Man. The Brits are no different, as this movie trips right out of the gate and falls so far back it has no chance.I'll spare you any detailed plot...it doesn't matter and by the end of the film you likely won't care. It's basically a story about a VR simulation program with a ghost who offs characters who then die in real life. If whomever wrote this isn't a hack, I defy you to show me a person that is. What follows is a bunch of horribly improbable situations that offer no other purpose than to kill another character (improbable even considering the film's subject matter) and a bunch of nonsense about catching a ghost in a computer. The actors do their parts just fine so you can't fault them...it's just a bad story, bad execution, and bad conceptualization. Really, it's just plain bad.