hyped garbage

Fresh and Exciting

As Good As It Gets

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Imagine in the early nineties, long before reality television was established as a format, ABC took cameras inside of a real haunted house. Imagine established television personalities like Diane Sawyer, Alex Trebeck, and Tim Allen were involved in the problem. What if seemingly genuine ghostly activity was caught on camera? What if things went terribly wrong? And what if it was all presented as 100% true? "Ghostwatch" did something much like that, involving recognizable BBC personalities in a convincing recreation of a haunting. It wasn't real, of course. Any one who noticed the opening and ending credits probably could have realized that. But tell that to the frightened, fooled television audience. People called in amass, complaining. Most tragically, an autistic child, taken in by the program, killed himself from the trauma. "Ghostwatch" was never aired again.The effectiveness of a program like "Ghostwatch" is dependent totally on how believable it is. Getting the most trusted newscaster in the world to go along with the prank wouldn't matter if the whole could be laughed off as a gag. Luckily, "Ghostwatch" is committed totally to verisimilitude. The structure of the film is calculated to appear as realistic as possible. The rhythm of any live television documentary is matched perfectly. The live feed of the family inside the house is cut back and forth with banal interviews with experts or previously recorded ghost stories. The mindless chit-chat between the hosts match the tone. This sets up the precedence of reality.The freakiness of the unspooling events slowly escalates. "Ghostwatch" is, if nothing else, an exercise in deliberate pacing. The film drawls from witnessed poltergeist phenomena. The opening features children awoken in their bed by banging on the walls. We see the pictures of the oldest sister covered with cuts. A mysterious wet spot appears on the carpet, perfectly circular. Photographs fly off the wall. The girls are consistently more worried. The temperature in their bedroom drops while their skin remains warm. The banging in the walls becomes more frequent. Video becomes distorted and slowed down. A stuffed bunny is found floating, eyeless, in the sink. The sound of cats crying and scratching overwhelms the dialogue. This all leads up to the film's most frightening moment. The boards on the crawlspace door are pulled off. The door slowly opens on its own accord. The audience catches a brief glimpse of Pipes before the camera cuts away. "Ghostwatch" isn't over after that, about ten minutes left to go, but the film obviously peaks in that moment.Have I mentioned Pipes? The central villain of "Ghostwatch" is a ghostly apparition of a balding man in a gray dress, his eyes and face scratched out. The ghost is never seen clearly, only in shadows or brief flashes. Some of these are very quick. The camera pans around the room, the spirit standing next to the girl's window. Panning back quickly, he's gone. Others are completely subliminal. He is briefly glimpsed in reflections or the background. "Ghostwatch" manages to build up an impressive mythology behind its villain over a series of three phone calls. A supposedly live caller rings in, discussing the haunted history of the area. We learn a baby farmer drowned infants in that house. Later on, in a sobering monologue, a different caller relates the history of the home's previous tenant. Normally, I'd be against a character just talking about the story's background. However, like Robert Shaw in "Jaws," sometimes the camera just needs to stop and listen.Being presented as true, the increasingly concerned callers were presumed to be real people as well. Viewers from all over the country report strange poltergeist activity. Without spoiling too much, the program suggests that, after Pipes and his nasty supernatural cronies are done ruining the Early's lives, they're coming for you. A lot of fiction attempts to yank the carpet out from under the viewer. Most come of as horribly hokey. "Ghostwatch" is presented so realistically, its program so convincingly spooky, you buy. I'll probably leave the hallway lights on tonight… It does take a patient viewer to enjoy "Ghostwatch." When Michael Parkinson and Dr. Lin Pascoe are looking at warped spoons, you'll be forgiven if your attention wanders. Similarly, a subplot involving a skeptical scientist in New York doesn't pay off much. The acting from Brid Brennan, as the oldest Early daughter, is a bit ropey at times. However, it's very easy to see why this program freaked people out. Still obscure in the States, "Ghostwatch" definitely deserves to be more widely seen. It's a shame "reality" TV ghost hunting shows, found footage films, and YouTube video hoaxes have made a similar experiment impossible. No one would buy "Ghostwatch" at face value today. Watching it on Halloween night, during the witching hour no less, I found myself believing. Just for a minute anyway.

I can understand why this show scared people when it came out. Filmed like some BBC live documentary, the show looks generally real. There are some places where the editing or camera-work would not have happened that way in a real live show, but I would expect people wouldn't think about that, and obviously kids wouldn't notice.The problem with Ghostwatch is because it wants to be convincingly real, it starts out convincingly slowly. Over the first half hour there are talking-heads style interviews and general chit chat and information stuff that would only interest people who were really interested in seeing a ghost documentary. In fact, I suspect one reason this show was so effective is that the most skeptical people would have tuned out through boredom early on, leaving only believers watching by the end.After the first tedious half hour I decided to fast forward until it looked like something interesting was going on. I wound up moving ahead another half hour.But once you're into the last third of the movie, things get pretty intense. Even if you know it's a mockumentary, the final moments are truly chilling, and I can only imagine how terrifying this was to those who thought it was a real documentary.Keep an eye out for ghostly apparitions. I missed most of them, although there is a youtube video that collects them all.

GHOSTWATCH is a fake documentary made by and shown on the BBC on Halloween 1992.Its disturbing nature and content created much controversy and scared the BBC from making anything like it again. I might also add that nothing like it has been produced before or since in the UK.It was buried away in a vault for a full 10 years and the BBC were adamant that they would never allow it to re-surface.But it pleases me to confirm that this masterpiece is now available on DVD and has attracted fans from across the world.Some skeptical readers of reviews about this documentary will probably immediately assume that positive thoughts and feelings are down to pure nostalgia on the part of young adults having seen and being terrified by it as a kid.Well the review you are reading now is coming from someone who did NOT see the documentary on its original showing and was already aware it was fake when he placed the DVD into the player.The plot sees the BBC send a crew to a house in North London to investigate paranormal activity. Already this house as been dubbed the "most haunted house in Britain". Living at the house are a single mother and her two children - both girls. Ghostly sightings, strange noises and inexplicable psychic and physical phenomena have been occurring at the house. The local authorities and press have not only looked upon the affair with extreme skepticism but have also painted the residents as highly disturbed people in need of psychiatric help.The events portrayed in the investigation are ingeniously co-ordinated to create a real-time effect. In addition, the choice of a studio setting similar to the TV series, CRIMEWATCH, complete with crew manning telephones, adds to the realism.Michael Parkinson has the time of his life presenting the supposedly real documentary. This really was the finest moment of his career. In the studio with him is an increasingly concerned parapsychologist determined to find a scientific explanation for what is occurring at the house.Action switches from the TV studio to the house and the exterior of the house frequently, adding to the excitement and maintaining interest.The presence of Craig Charles, a well-known presenter of children's TV shows, adds to the misleading innocence and light-hearted nature that is so important at the beginning. Due to this factor, many parents were off-guard and allowed their children to watch the show, believing it was just a light-hearted affair.The events at the house become increasingly erratic as the show progresses. And then we see people engaging in arguments, distrusting one another, making accusations and tempers rising progressively. The tension rises higher and higher and it soon becomes apparent that this masterpiece is much more than the light-hearted affair viewers were misled to believe up to this point.The show even has two other elements to make it appear real - a fake hoax reveal and a fake "time's up" point. These "double bluffs" work like a charm.But the entertainment goes on and on. The link between the studio and the house becomes lost again and again. A mysterious caller reveals some history of the house that suggests a malevolent intention on the part of the "ghosts". Eventually all this tension and suspense reaches a crescendo point that truly has to be seen in order to be believed.The direction is superb throughout. There are no buckets of blood and gore here. Inexplicable imagery, inhuman voices, bumps, crashes, breaking glass, eerie surroundings, the seemingly innocent behaving strangely and a sense of malevolence are the driving forces. The horror comes from a steadily rising feeling of unease, the effectiveness of the "double bluffs", and the perception that the producers have lost control of a situation and may be in real danger of harm.At the end of this show, you are almost certainly guaranteed to feel unnerved and on your guard for the days and weeks after. The mixture of fact and fiction shown here really is that powerful.I must disagree with many of my fellow fans of GHOSTWATCH as I thought the acting was mostly stellar and not wooden as many have stated.The legacy of GHOSTWATCH is evident, having spawned movies like THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, THE LAST BROADCAST and REC. Opinion over the success of these subsequent works is far more divided however.Overall, GHOSTWATCH is an absolutely ingenious horrific masterpiece that is a must-see for every horror fan.

I was 12 when Ghostwatch was shown on Holloween on BBC1! I remember sitting on the sofa with my Brother and Mam, my Dad went out before the show had began. We were pulled into the story and got scared to death by Pipes and the story of the Early family, this was years before Most Haunted hit the screens! You could spot Pipes, you could hear the stories and watch as the team falls apart! I totally believed Sarah Greene was taken by Pipes and that Parky was taken over by Pipes too, GREAT TV! Little did we know that it was due to be banned and never shown again, until the ban ran out and it was released on DVD/Video, which I had for Xmas 3 years ago! Even now I cant watch it alone or with the lights off.....the power of being 12 back then and Pipes coming to get me still shakes me up! For me Ghostwatch is pure great British TV! Sure it might be dated and some people might call it boring...but to this 26 years old...sleepiness nights happen after I watch this show 14 years later!