Ghost Month

Have you seen The Grudge, The Ring, or any of those other slapdash American remakes of various Asian horror movies? Good, because then you won’t have to suffer through Ghost Month because you’ve already seen it! This new direct-to-video horror offering takes various bits and pieces of all of these already remade films and puts them in a blender. What ends up being poured out resembles a mix of every single Asian horror movie made, but on a ten-dollar budget.

We’re introduced to Alyssa (Marina Resa), a 20-something on the way to her new housekeeping job, as she violently tosses her cellphone out the side window of a taxi barreling through the desert. It seems like her boyfriend is stalking her, but we aren’t sure why, and Ghost Month never particularly stays on the subplot long enough to divulge any particular reason. This fact is left on the side of the road with her cell as Alyssa arrives at the Wu residence, an adobe house in the middle of a nondescript desert.

The Wus are, if you haven’t put two-and-two together already, Chinese, as what’s scarier in an American horror film than a duo of elderly Asian women? Everything is normal at first: the two do creepy chants and burn various things in a fire pit outside of the house on a nightly basis, show Alyssa their “creepy” purple unfinished basement, and act generally mean and nasty. Things apparently start to get weird when Alyssa disturbs the spirits by kicking some dust and begins to see lots of smoke and demonic hair everywhere. Uh-oh. It’s apparently that time of the year again: Ghost Month. It seems that, according to Asian mythology, the seventh month of the year is Ghost Month, a time in which various spirits rise up from hell and annoy the crap out of the living.

But what about the boyfriend? He makes an appearance here and there, but the rest of Ghost Month’s 100-minute runtime is mostly set aside for Alyssa’s various hallucinations, which look like something one would experience after dropping acid and screwing around with a fog machine. Alyssa encounters these ghosts fairly often, but their antics never extend what plot the film has to offer, and their CGI-fueled appearances are amusingly short. The majority of these scenes are thus static shots of Alyssa screaming while various colors flash and things swoop at her until she randomly comes out of her hallucinatory coma and continues to clean the Wu’s house, only mildly shaken up from what just happened to her. She attempts to convey her visions to others at one point by saying, “I’m…seeing people…and things…everywhere!” It’s okay, Alyssa, I see “people and things” all the time too!

There’s also a small romantic subplot involving Alyssa and the Wu’s single veterinarian horse-breeding neighbor who, due to his occupation and lifestyle, is somehow presumed to be gay. However, it never particularly develops, as Alyssa is apparently too busy tripping balls and cowering in fear of demonic hair and bald zombies to have any sort of love life. They do, however, share a delightful scene in which they attempt to have an intellectual conversation about Virginia Woolf but fail miserably.

In the end, Ghost Month attempts to congeal the previous 90-minute mess of a plot with a groan-inducing plot twist and various brawls that seem to have been shot just to pad the film’s runtime. If you thought Ghost Month was vague, fear not! The final scene suggests a potential sequel in the works, which hopefully will never rise out of production hell itself. Ghost Month needs to get a pat on the back, though, for being one of the single worst horror films I have seen in recent memory. That takes a lot of effort, and not too many films could successfully pull it off.