Ghost Game tells the tale of two couples & close friends, Abbey (Shelby Fenner) & Nate (Peter Cilella) plus Dara (Alexandra Barreto) & Randy (Curt Cornelius) who decide to get together for a camping weekend. They drive deep into the isolated forest wilderness where the Buckhorn River Resort is located miles from civilisation, the resort manager Simon (Eric Woods) points them in the general direction of their cabin & they're off. Sebastian (Aaron Patrick Freeman) along with his girlfriend Talia (Danielle Hartnett) & an idiot named Cousin Ted (Robert Berson) also turn up later on to join the party. Unfortunately being stuck in a log cabin in the middle of nowhere without so much a as Playstation can understandably become boring (a bit like watching this film in fact) so they decide to do things the old fashioned way & play a board game. They come across a metal box with what looks like a game of some sort inside & despite the worrying 'Do Not Play This Game' note inside they give it a whirl anyway. However they are unaware that they have unleashed three ghosts, the ghosts of a coven of teenage witches named Jessi (Sarah Shoup), Rachel (Caroline D'Amore) & Lucy (Sahra Silanee) who died 30 odd years ago in a supernatural ceremony that went wrong. As the friends start to die the survivors realise that they must play the game to a complete finish if they want to escape with they're lives...
Co-produced & directed by Joe Knee I thought Ghost game was average at best & just another crap low budget shot on video travesty that clutter video shop shelves at worst. The script by Benjamin Oren is slow, fairly predictable, populates the film with highly irritating character's especially Talia & has no conviction. As the friends drive out to an isolated log cabin I was thinking The Evil Dead (1981) crossed with a bit of Cabin Fever (2002) & when I saw the woods I was also thinking that the filmmakers had recently seen The Blair Witch Project (1999) along with Friday the 13th (1980) & it's fairly easy to tell that these (& more besides) had an influence on Ghost Game, but then it goes into a slightly different direction with all the supernatural stuff & the game. Unfortunately it makes no real difference as the annoying character's remain, the whole story when you think about it doesn't make any sense, the horror aspects are disappointingly tame & as a whole the film sucks, it's as simple & straight forward as that. For some bizarre reason the IMDb jointly lists Ghost Game as a comedy/horror, well I can tell you now that there is no intentional comedy in this film at all & it takes itself 100% seriously.
Director Knee obviously didn't have a big budget to work with & it shows, Ghost Game has straight-to-video written all over it from the cheap shot on video picture quality, the fact there's only about ten people in the entire thing & only one location used throughout. There is zero atmosphere, tension, scares or significant gore apart from a bit when someone falls on a branch & is impaled on it through their throat.
With a supposed budget of about $200,000 I can cut it a little bit of slack but as a whole it's still bland, forgettable & dull. I ain't surprised this went straight-to-video that's for sure. The acting was OK but as I've said I found the teenage character's highly irritating & I was sitting there hoping they would just all get killed & Ghost Game would finish thereby putting me out of my misery. Having said that the three goth girls who played the witches were pretty hot.
Ghost Game did nothing for me, it's slightly more original than a lot of low budget rubbish, it's competent & it's not as bad as some of these straight-to-video crap I've sat through but that in itself is no recommendation. Watchable if your desperate.