By Lori Perkins
I love horror comedy. My favorite horror movie is Zombieland, but I’m also very fond of Shaun of the Dead, so I was eager to see what the director of Happy Death Day did with We Have a Ghost, especially since America seems to have fallen under the spell of the remake of the British TV show Ghosts.
It starts off with a lot of fun, as video of teenager Fulton’s encounters with the ghost in the family’s new fixer-upper Chicago home goes viral on YouTube. Family dad played by Andrew Mackie tries to cash-in on this supernatural phenomenon in his home calling in a medium played by none other than It-Girl of the moment Jennifer Coolidge (who almost steals the whole movie).
But then the movie careens into a road trip/car chase with two teens (Fulton and his next door neighbor/love interest) and a search to find out why the ghost is there. It becomes much more a traditional ghost movie/mystery, which is fine, but far from outrageous comedy.
Don’t get me wrong—I enjoyed it, but it’s just not the classic I wanted it to be.
So much so, that I found the short story the movie was based on, Ernest by Goeff Manaugh which appeared in Vice five years ago, https://www.vice.com/en/article/vb75wx/ernest, which I also enjoyed (the ghost appears on Jimmy Kimmel instead of YouTube), but the story had the same issues for me as the film.