Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

The principle of the newly reopened Canyon City High School, Joy Walker (Aleisha Force) is lamenting to her husband Gary (the LEGENDARY Joey Greco) about a particularly heinous crime that has just happened at her school.  I paraphrase here: “First day of school and we already have a double homicide.  That’s not going to over well with the School Board!”  You don’t think?  What a defeatist attitude.  Next thing you know the asshole school board is going object to us renaming the school Bin Laden High or complain about the teenage sex rooms we have in the school – so at least we can monitor their activities.  Damn misunderstanding school board.  It’s not like twenty people died here, just two.  Start bitching when number reaches twenty students getting slaughtered in this school, which should be achieved in about 80 minutes.

You see the asshole school board in this movie ‘Devon’s Ghosts’ closed the school ten years ago in the first place because of the murder of seven year old little Devon Singleton.  Or at least we think he was murdered because no body was ever found.  Plus the murder happened across the street from the school and not AT the school which begs the question did they close every school in Canyon City simply because there was a murder nearby?  This might explain why the characters are so stupid in this movie since I’m going to assume they didn’t have a school to go to for the last ten years.  It appears that Devon was murdered by his parents who managed to beat that rap because of their slick lawyer, but later on that week so many years ago, Devon’s parents were brutally murdered and a little girl named Symphony swore she saw a bloody boy who would have killed her too.

Now a high school senior, Symphony (Karen Ashley) is a spastic cheerleader / Kung Fu master prone to nightmares and panic attacks.  As a matter of fact she has a nightmare in History class where she woke up screaming her lungs out, freaking out all of her other little classmates.  Now if you’re like me you may be wondering what the hell she was doing sleeping in History class in the first place, because if you don’t sleep in class, the chances of having nightmares in class is miniscule.  But apparently that was only me.  These nightmares are justified however because it seems that the once believed to be murdered Devon has grown up into a super strong, circular saw rigged baseball bat carrying lunatic who is killing pretty much anyone he can.  Now it’s up to Karen and her crew which consists of her boyfriend Craig (Jonny Cruz), best galpal Genesis (Kristy Vaughn), the sexual orientationally ambiguous second Kung Fu master Josh (Johnny Yong Bosch) and weirdo outcast boy Freedom (Matt Moore) to find Devon and stop of his reign of terror before it reaches them!

I will admit that Devon’s ghost is one of the silliest little DTV horror films I’ve seen in some time, mostly due to characters doing things are stupid even in horror movie lore.  For example when a character is at a house party and hears a blood curdling scream of terror, his choices are to: A. Go back inside the house and tell everybody that somebody is being murdered out in the woods, please the call the cops or B. run blindly into the woods and find out what all that ruckus is about.  When another character at this same party is shoved out a second story window to save her life (don’t ask) and sees the blood boy running at her, she should: A. run back in the house and alert the other partiers that a lunatic is trying to kill her or B. flee into woods away any possible assistance.  When this same character jumps into a car to protect herself from the baseball bat wielding bloody boy, the bloody boy should A. Use the bat to break a window and kill the bitch or B. get all pissy and run away.  And there is so much more.

‘Devon’s Ghost’ stars Karen Ashley who was the yellow Power Ranger and Johnny Yong Bosch who was the black Power Ranger.  You may observe that these two were too old to be high school students when that show was on back in 1995 much less today, and your observations would be correct.  Jason Priestly and Luke Perry think these two are too old to be playing high school students. 

There’s not a lot to recommend about Devon’s ghost.  The acting is somewhat amateurish, the direction is very spotty, the editing is suspect, and the story makes very little sense, but it did have a few halfway decent Kung Fu action sequences, as silly as it may have been, AND it does have Joey Greco in it.  Joey of course is the host of the TV show ‘Cheaters’ and hell, I didn’t even know he was an actor.  And yes, Joey may not be the second coming of Marlon Brando, but this is a man that got knifed during an episode of ‘Cheaters’.  You hear me?  This cat took a shank for his art, and as such he will forever be awesome in my eyes.  So if you want to see long in the tooth actors play high school students and the host of ‘Cheaters’ in a horror / Kung Fu movie the Devon’s ghost may be up your alley.

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