Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

Jennifer (Elizabeth Rohm) is nuts. To be charitable to Jennifer in this horror / thriller ‘Ghost Image’ we can understand some of Jennifer’s loony behavior since she’s been dealing with being the only survivor of a horrible car wreck that took her family years ago, but considering that Jennifer often gets uninvited visits from her dead and bloodied baby sister… sure, Jennifer is nuts. The good thing for Jennifer is that medication is helping keep her sister in Netherland and she has a loving and caring boyfriend in Wade (Waylon Payne) who sees to her every need.

Well we know that’s not going to last now don’t we? Jennifer and Wade have a small video business they run together and they are working on a big project that should really set them off on the right track to prosperity. Tragically, on the way to handle some business one morning, Wade dies in car accident and now Jennifer’s adventure really starts to get going.

One thing about that Wade is that he took his video camera everywhere and videotaped everything, including himself, so Jennifer has hours upon hours of footage of Wade to look upon which is really stemming the woman’s healing process. Odder still, on occasion, it seems as if Wade is actually talking to Jennifer while she’s watching her dead fiancés videos. That’s just plum crazy right? The plot thickens as a pair of cops investigating the crash have discovered that the crash was not an accident thus giving us a mystery on our hands as we have to figure out would want to kill Wade? Or who would want to kill Jennifer since Wade died driving Jennifer’s car? And the dead and bloodied sister has returned. And Jennifer is now having full conversations with her dead boyfriend on her computer monitor who seems to be helping her solve his murder… A murder that a completely nutty Jennifer very well might have committed.

I can’t be too hard on ‘Ghost Image’ because the films director Jack Snyder is from my original home town of St. Louis and he actually shot the movie in The Lou replete with a loving shot of our gloried Gateway Arch. Admittedly if Mr. Snyder didn’t include that shot I wouldn’t have known this was actually shot in St. Louis but we’re still happy to see the old home town get some play. All that being said ‘Ghost Image’ is a thriller style movie that simply doesn’t have enough thrills built into it.

I believe the concept is a good one and Elizabeth Rohm does a credible job of being an extremely unstable freak out queen during the duration of the movie, but what started out looking like a pretty decent build up for a horror style ghost story, this film instead diverted itself from its original setup to became a questionable murder mystery. From where I was sitting, the ghost story angle was working pretty well with the dead sister appearing at inopportune times, the dead boyfriend suddenly yelling out at his girlfriend from beyond the LCD monitor and this mysterious hulking figure stalking Jennifer that appeared and disappeared out of thin air. Add to this the fact that we don’t know if these visions of Jennifer’s are real or are simply nuggets because of her fractured mind, and we have a very intriguing story line.

As the movie wore on however the supernatural elements were whittled away with the story being brought more into the real world and ‘Ghost Image’ ceased being a intriguing supernatural thriller and transforms into a glorified episode of ‘Murder She Wrote’. Nothing but love for ‘Murder She Wrote’ and my girl Angela Lansbury but I do personally prefer freaky, bloody dead kids a little more than tired mysteries. Now that the movie has become a murder movie there are a host of characters to choose from who may be our killer, including Stacey Dash who at 43 is still hot as hell, but since the movie split the time given to our potential murderers, it merely glossed over most of these characters and as such its hard to invest a lot of emotion into these said characters, so I really didn’t care who the murder was.

‘Ghost Image’ is nice looking film, slickly produced and well acted. It’s also a very ‘safe’ film having the look and feel of the kind of production you might see on Lifetime as the violence is very tame and there’s no cursing or nudity so at least you can let the kids and granny watch without worrying about their fragile psyches.

‘Ghost Image’ did have some potential with it’s reasonably cool concept and nice launching point, but unfortunately it petered out trying to serve two genres and probably was a little too safe for its own good.