WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO FAMILY MOVIES?

Let me rephrase the question. It should be more like, what the hell happened to low budget family movies?

There was a time when the mom and pop video rental stores had INVISIBLE MOM and REMOTE CONTROL, and I know they were not the best in terms of quality, but they were certainly far better than the crap that I see today.

What kicked off this rant of sorts, is when I rented a family movie, for my own family's movie night, and the plot centers around a group of kids who go on a ghost hunt. Simple enough premise, right? Plus as a bonus you have that whole spooky paranormal stuff which is like pulp for kids.

What ruins the whole experience is...well it's a laundry list, really. The first and foremost is the acting. The kids have have some leeway. I mean, after all, they are just kids.

However, the adults have no excuse. They should know better and gotten their acting chops a bit together. Yet the whole thing is like watching a really bad junior college play.

Then there is the dialogue. There is just too much of it. The amount of it is staggering. The script must have been huge. It's a wonder how the kids in the flick even remembered half of it. The old screenwriting adage, "less is more, was not paid any heed to here.

Story-wise, it should be a slam dunk. You start with a legend, then a small subplot, and then back to the legend and a ending. But in this flick, you have characters that almost have their own subplot that detract from the overall storyline and the main subplot which is predictable to say the least.

Then there is the camera work that went into it. Man, oh, man. Let's not even go into that. It would make for a whole new post and a longer rant. But you get the idea of how I felt about this movie.

I miss the days when Roger Corman, Fred Olen Ray, and even Charles Band would crank out kids flicks. At least there was some entertainment value in them.