Mostly Ghostly Is Mostly Cheesy

In late October, I watched Safe Haven, the Criminal Minds episode starring Sterling Beaumon as a teenage serial killer. Beaumon caught my attention back in 2007 when he first played young Benjamin Linus on LOST, and I was once again impressed with his acting abilities in this even darker role, but I found myself wishing I could see him playing a kid who didn’t have quite so many issues. I got my wish, sort of, when I stumbled upon Mostly Ghostly, a direct-to-DVD movie airing on the Disney Channel in which Beaumon stars as an aspiring magician who discovers that he can see and hear ghosts. Yeah, that’s a little weird, and he has to put up with bullying peers, an obnoxious brother and an overbearing dad who wishes he was more into sports, but Max Doyle is a pretty typical kid, and there’s nothing very unsettling about this movie.

Unless it’s maybe the fact that Beaumon agreed to be in it.

No, the movie isn’t that atrocious, but it certainly is not movie theater quality. This flick, based on the books by R. L. Stine and with a screenplay by Pat Proft and director Richard Correll, features some of the stupidest dialogue I’ve ever heard uttered in a movie, and everything about it, from the performances to the special effects, is hammy and over-the-top.

That means Beaumon, too, though at least I thought he made the most of opportunities for physical comedy with his expressive gestures and awkward gait. This movie came out in 2008, so I’m not sure whether it was filmed before or after LOST’s The Man Behind the Curtain, but the role of babbling, dorky Max definitely seems a step backward from the sullen, nearly silent Ben we saw in that episode. All the same, he is the most tolerable part of the movie.

Adam Hicks is the stereotypical lunk-headed older brother who reminded me very much of Buzz from the Home Alone movies. Everything he says seems to come a couple seconds too late; perhaps this is to emphasize that Colin is a little slow on the uptake, but it had the effect of making it seem like Hicks was always forgetting his lines and only recovering at the last minute.

Tara and Nicky, the two ghostly children who end up befriending Max, are played by Madison Pettis and Luke Benward. The latter generally just sort of fades into the background, while Pettis’s most notable trait is her impish giggle, along with her tendency to shriek. She also has a toothy grin that she flashes quite often. Tara is a cute and spunky kid, but a little of her goes a long way. Meanwhile, Brian Stepanek plays Phears, the ghoulish spook to whom Tara and Nicky represent a great threat. He’s vaguely menacing but far too cheesy to actually creep anyone out, except perhaps very young viewers. The moments in which he comes so close to the camera that he seems likely to burst through the TV screen are especially absurd.

Like so much typical Disney family fare, this movie involves a child struggling to be more popular and especially to earn the romantic regard of an attractive fellow student. On the home front, he mostly wishes that he could make his dad more appreciative of his interests. Plus, he’s caught up in a mystery that involves reuniting his new friends with their missing parents. The movie delivers some degree of resolution on all those fronts, though in true Stine fashion, the final frame gives us an indication that evil, in the form of Phears, has not been wholly eradicated.

Mostly Ghostly is a movie to watch if you’re in the mood for something incredibly goofy. I always thought of Stine as pretty spooky, but this most definitely isn’t, and it’s written in such a way that every word out of every mouth sounds totally unnatural. Even if there had been more genuinely scary elements here, I think I would have been too distracted by the bad dialogue to notice. And I was on the verge of throwing the remote at the TV if I had to hear that dumb rhyme Max recites ad nauseam throughout the movie one more time. So while it’s good to know that Beaumon’s career has allowed him the occasional reprieve from playing such deeply tormented characters, Mostly Ghostly is nothing to boast about.