By: Mordicai

 

The film opens with the monotonous scene of a young boy walking alone through a city, cautiously gazing upward. What could he afraid of? Child abductors… satanists… or perhaps he fears our narrator’s nonsensical ramblings? The narration, boomingly voiced by Sidney Paul, makes you feel like you’re a fly on the wall of a sanitarium.

 

Who could have conceived of such tripe? Could it have been… ghosts?  Whose idea was it to toss in pointless Loch Ness monster footage? Could it have been… ghosts? What could have possessed Christopher Sereni to write such painfully melodramatic dialog, a dialog consisting only of rhetorical questions? Could it have been… a… ghosts?

 

Director Wheeler Dixon must have spent the better part of an hour trying to correlate this mountain of unconnected stock footage, with the adroitness of a junior high collage artist the night before his project is due. His talent for concocting lies about the scenes and relating them to ghostly phenomenon is the most ‘amazing’ thing about this ‘documentary.'

 

For example, apparently just to fill time, a good portion of the film covers a Chilean earthquake, careful to intersperse the word ‘ghosts’ at every opportunity – just to remind you that you’re still watching the same film.  In Wheeler Dixon’s capable hands, a man walking in an empty field becomes a “ghost researcher” searching the earthquake ruins for evidence of spirits. African American street musicians and dancers in a park become entranced victims of a ‘hoodoo’ ceremony. Topics covered include black masses, séances, fairies, Bigfoot, Project Bluebook and our solar system.

 

Everything in this documentary is wrong. Facts are bandied about without any apparent attempt at verification. Stock footage rarely synchs with the dialogue. I had to check the credits to see if Helen Keller was responsible for the editing. Only one suggestion, if you decide to make a documentary on ghosts, please ensure that at least ten percent of your footage is actually related to the subject… I’m nit-picking, I know. I’d love to expose everything that is wrong with this video, but it will take generations of scholars to catalog the inaccuracies presented in this ‘film.’

 

I guarantee that if you actually believe in ghosts, after seeing this toilet ring of celluloid, you won’t. They should have called it the Amazing World of Ineptitude. One good point, it does have a groovy jazz soundtrack that kicks in at every random occasion, regardless of the topic. Keep watching until the end to see the narrator’s final UFO rant continue to run over the closing credits. The film may have been over, but a great voice talent like Sidney Paul stops only when Sidney Paul feels like it.

 

Impenetrable logic!

 

“The Amazing World of Ghosts” is the cinematic equivalent of huffing paint; depending on your tastes, you may find it one of the funniest things you’ve ever seen, or it may just result in headaches and a loss of motor skills.

 

 

Watch at your own risk, but if you do, enjoy it alone in a darkened room shortly after receiving a massive head injury. For added fun, drink every time the narrator asks a question that is never answered or, for the truly brave, anytime he mentions “ghosts.”

 

Rating: 3/5 Mysterious Orbs