This Geek in Netflix: Ghosts of Goldfield

Rarely do I get stir-crazy and bored while watching horror movies. There’s nearly always something redemptive about them, whether it be a great scene (Ghost Ship, I’m looking at you), a great soundtrack, or hysterically bad acting. Truly, I usually can find something to latch onto.

2007’s Ghosts of Goldfield is one of the few films that I gave up on trying to enjoy and instead embraced the boredom that comes with those few movies that aren’t good,but aren’t laughably shitty either.

The acting wasn’t good, even though there’s a definite spread of talent. Our lead actress, Marnette Patterson, is a constant television actress with the standard extra roles on the even more standard host of shows. Our cliched “sexy chick”, Mandy Amano (who is quite attractive, I will say), has been in minor roles in movies such things as Coyote Ugly (one of my guilty pleasures) and Crank: High Voltage (less a guilty pleasure and more of a source of masturbation material). Really, though, the only actor of note (and the only one that can actually act) is Kellan Lutz.

You know, Kellan Lutz. Emmett Cullen from the Twilight series. Poseidon from Immortals. Kellan Lutz. Weird sorta blip there. Speaking of blips, let’s just go into the beginning of the movie summary with an awkward transition. Yay!

The scene is set: a desert drive in a white SUV overlaid with the opening credits and pictures of old ghost towns. We hear the chatter of inane kids in their early twenties regarding their road trip to a haunted motel, where I pull the gem:

“Today we’re headin’ up to the famous Goldfield Hotel to see if we can find us some real live ghosts.”

If poor phrasing was a sin, this guy would be dead already.

Also! We get to see the ghost, prompting the following mid-movie-watching note:

Didn’t you guys learn anything from Muoi: The Legend of a Potrait? Jesus. Stop revealing the goddamned end boss 50 seconds into the movie. Who do I need to call to make this stop happening? SOMEONE, GET GEORGE ROMERO ON THE PHONE, STAT.

As we get some degree of introduction to the characters, we learn that the blonde is a psychology major, working on her thesis which, as far as I can tell, has absolutely nothing to do with psychology. Brunette is a red shirt, working on her five-finger discount and mad faux-lesbian skills. She’ll be the first to die, just before Mr. English-Ain’t-Mah-First-Language gets taken out by a rogue piece of rusty pipe. There are also three guys, but they’re indistinguishable from each other until about forty-five minutes in.

The car ride continues until the blonde falls asleep in the fading light and we get to flash-forward to the scene where one of the guys, a hipster-looking douchebag, gets killed. So not only is the monster being revealed again, so is one of the deaths.

Of course, I could see hipsters being knifed in the skull all day and not get sick of it, so it’s not such a bad thing. God, I hope we see it like eight more times.

Blonde also hears, “Come back to me…” as she wakes, whispered by the ghost. When she comes to, she’s clutching her necklace.

Okay, how many people want to bet that by the end of this movie, everyone is dead but the blonde, who is not killed by the ghost because the ghost is actually her grandmother or great-grandmother who died while looking for her baby (who was kidnapped or whatever) who ended up being perfectly fine and starting a family of her own? WHO WANTS TO LAY SOME MONEY ON THE LINE?!

I’m at the 3 minute, 15 second mark of this movie, and if this doesn’t work out like I predicted, I’m going to punish myself by eating a chocolate chip cookie. If it does work out, I’m eating a chocolate chip cookie *and* making a booty call. (Post-movie update: I might have been wrong, but the theme was there. I’m still making that call.)

Around sunset, the car dies while taking a shortcut to the hotel. Bad dialogue ensues about why the car broke down but, really, the car was probably just rebelling against the douchey-est haircut known to man that the driver was sporting. If he let someone cut it to something that contained lesser levels of douchery, the car would start again.

After much whining, they start walking to the hotel. I can’t even speak to the line of “We’ve been walking so long, it’s dark already,” when they started walking at goddamned sunset. Someone punch the goddamned brunette for me. Just reach through the goddamned screen and just pop her one.

During their night wanderings, they find an old cemetary. Good for them. Anyhow, the little cunty brunette decides she doesn’t wanna go into the cemetery and you can’t make her, waaaah. Until, of course, the whispering starts. “Bloooody finger, bloooooody finnggerrrr!”

Sorry. Was re-living my campfire story days.

“Where’s my baby? Where’s my baaaabyyyyyy?” followed by, “Closer, my darling, closer.” Which was followed by a coyote howl. OF COURSE IT WAS.

The blonde experiences double-vision and a sudden sepia-toned flashback where we get to witness some godawful dancing and the reveal that one hundred (or whatever) years ago, the blonde used to be a waitress in the bar where the ghost worked (while alive, you nitwits).

When she comes out of it, the brunette is racing towards her and one of the idiots… er, men… is missing. Mike. Whichever one that one was.

He ends up popping out from behind a grave, scaring everyone, and then announcing repeatedly that he “got” them all. You know, being an idiotic horror movie stereotype.

So, death order as stands is:

1. Cunty brunette who needs a good punching
2. Mike (may or may not have English issues)
3. Idiot with English issues (may or may not be Mike)

After their brush with stupidity, the five kids head into the suddenly located ghost town to hopefully suddenly locate the hotel.

Hotel = suddenly located! \o/

Let’s take a moment to note that this is supposed to be a ghost town, you know, one of those California/Nevada/Arizona towns that was all hustle and bustle while people were working towards their Manifest Destiny or mining the shit out of the mountains and then dried up for a variety of reasons, generally in the 1920s.

So please ignore the goddamned stop sign in front of the hotel. Oh, and the open bar across the street from the hotel. You know, in the town that one of the less mentally disabled kids said had no vistors aside from the occasional tourist.

After awkward and vaguely illogical conversation with the bartender and his lone patron, the Scooby gang gets a key to the abandoned (and fully furnished and clean) hotel, with instructions not to go into room 109. (Because you know those instructions’ll be followed.)

The bartender explains that George Winfield, Elizabeth’s boss and sex-patron, killed poor Elizabeth in room 109. During this story, the bartender gets incredibly, oddly emotional about Elizabeth and then, when asked if he somehow knew her (kids can’t do math), he explains that he’s seen paintings of her and basically put all of his sex drive into pastels and turned into a total dead-chick-stalking creep.

I may have elaborated on that last part.

After story time is over, the kids walk over to the hotel, where the blonde has another sepia-toned flashback where she sees Elizabeth receive the gift of a necklace (Whaaat? Like the necklace the blonde was playing with at the beginning of the film? SHOCKING.) from her beau “for the baby”.

Back in modern day, the cunty brunette steals the hotel desk’s bell while the idiot who likes to scare people scares people again and then busts out the alcohol.

It’s almost like they want to die.

The next hour of this movie is spent with them roaming around multiple locations cobbled together to represent a hotel that is mostly birthed from locations that were clearly not built in the early 1900s. From fire sprinklers to uniform gray carpeting to flouresent lights to modern plumbing, the hotel fails to provide any atmosphere except for the sad sort of desperate amusement one gets when visiting one of those truck stops/mini-casinos that dot the highways in Nevada.

What are they doing while roaming? Fuck if I know. There seems to be an overarching plot… kinda. I mean, it’s mostly there. And then there’s all these little potential side plots that amount to nothing and then there’s just severe amounts of minor plot inconsistencies that make the whole thing rather shaky, and I’m not sure if I should blame those issues on the screenwriter or the editor.

In sum: Editing fail. Script fail. Character fail. Plot fail. Location fail. Fail fail. (Or would that be “success fail”? I just wanted to write “fail fail”. Seemed like a good idea.)

I don’t suggest queuing this up on your Netflix. It’s simply not worth it. I can’t even design a drinking game around this, other than “drink every time Kellan Lutz is hot”, which is a totally gimme.

Until next week, kids.