Trailer Tuesday: GHOST TOWN

I feel like it’s been a while since we’ve had a fun ghost story movie, no? Okay, so there seems to be one every other year, but it may actually have been like three years since the last one (bonus points if you can name some of the latest in the comments).

They always seem to fall into one of two categories: the family-friendly movie with a spooky-turned-friendly ghost (Haunted Mansion, Casper) or the ghost-love story where a living person helps a ghost set something right and somehow love gets mixed in (Ghost, Just Like Heaven, Heart and Souls, Downey Jr.’s last popular film before he reinvented himself). The latter is the “sophisticated” ghost story. What we’ll call the Haunted Chick Flick.

Add one to that category: Ghost Town, starring Ricky Gervais, Greg Kinnear and Téa Leoni.

Ghost Town is about Bertram Pincus (Gervais), a man who doesn’t care much for keeping up social niceties with other people. Basically, he’s a jerk — but a funny jerk. After being revived from a seven-minute flatliner experience, Bertram’s gained the ability to see the dead, Kinnear (in his second fall movie, along with Flash of Genius) being one of them.

The dead want some help reaching the living and Pincus becomes man for the job. Look, you know where all this is going. But the trailer’s actually quite funny thanks to the always hilarious Gervais. He isn’t really doing anything new — it’s just that his schtick hasn’t gotten old yet.

I’d like to see more ghost movies that fall into the all-but-abandoned third category: the “twisted sense of humor that’s family-friendly but kind of not” spooky movies the likes of The Addams Family and Beetlejuice.

:: Release Date: September 19, 2008

:: Director: David Koepp, who did Secret Window and Stir of Echoes,so he’s no stranger to the spooky.

Other Posts of Interest

September 2nd, 2008
Categories: Trailers, Comedies . Author: Allison

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