Regretful HalloWatch: Casper (1995)

ugh

Watched:  10/25/2024

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Brad Siberling

selection:  Jamie.  She made me watch this.

@#$%ing Casper (1995).  

I hated this movie in 1995 when I saw it, and, here, nearly 30 years later, I remember exactly why.  This movie is the culmination of so many bad ideas from the 90's, it's almost a wee bit magical.  It's a kid's movie where they made it 35% for adults and 50% for kids and 15% for a peculiar audience of people who want things to suck real bad.

I have no doubt Millennials Space Jam Fallacy the crap out of this movie (ie: believe this movie is good because they liked it when they were young and their brains were spongey and "good" meant mommy would let you play it over and over on the VHS while she drank wine with the pool boy), but this movie is a parade of 90's excess.  It's also proof that you can drop $55 million (> $110 million adjusted) on a movie, pack it with faces, meta references and other 90's tricks - and it's no better than, say, Bailey Saves Christmas.  

I'm old enough that Casper cartoons were still running on TV when I was a very little kid.*  As a young reader, I was given Harvey Comics starring Casper, Hot Stuff, Wendy the Witch, Ritchie Rich, et al... .  Flash forward to the mid-90's, we were exploiting IP in interesting ways at the movies - making live action Flintstones.  Addams Family.  I'd also seen Dennis the Menace.  And I am sure other things.  So why not a live action Casper?  

Casper was enough in the zeitgeist (HA!) that this movie is laden with celebrity cameos that will mean nothing to the kids of today.  Or probably Zillenials.  Mostly it's a testament to how in 1995 people were still in a mode where folks were pointing at an IP and winking at it as they made the movie.  And you'd think Casper was much beloved, but...

As a character, Casper is a one-note joke that kind of sucks.  He's a ghost, see, and he walks up to people and says "hello".  But, again, and follow me here - he is a dead person's spirit, so seeing a bodiless spirit damned to walk the earth is not something most people are used to.  So, the subject of Casper's greeting, not expecting an unquiet spirit to offer them a pleasant day, shits their pants and declares "A G-GH-GH-OOOOOOSSSST!" before running off screen.  And then Casper would be sad and friendless - doomed to walk the earth, denied the one thing he wants - a friend.  That's Casper.  That's his whole fucking deal in the cartoons.  Kids love the idea of wandering the earth for eternity, friendless and unloved.  Hilarious.  And clearly fodder for a 90 minute movie.

His comics were the sort of thing aimed at kids that, by the time you could read them yourself, you'd kind of outgrown, but were safe for parents to give you.  It was, like, whoops... Casper has to make a pie for Wendy and can't get berries because he's scaring the farmer or something.  At least Hot Stuff existed to fuck some shit up and torch people who upset him.

Thus, I had no particular affection for Casper as a character - I was more of a Quick Draw McGraw and Yogi Bear sort of kid if I couldn't watch Bugs Bunny.  and, yet, I figured, back in 1995 "they spent money and got name actors... how bad could this Casper movie be?"  

Well.

Look, this movie has all the hallmarks of way too many people being involved, too many scripts written, and a director in over their head.  There's multiple thin plots, too many characters, actors hired into roles that were clearly reduced....  the arcs and themes sort of come out of nowhere and never really gel - it's like several scripts just stapled together.  It does occur to me most modern TV is just this, but they just go ahead and film everything and hope it all works over 10 hours.

And, somehow, this movie makes Christina Ricci, Bill Pullman, Eric Idle and Cathy Moriarty seem like hack actors in an Air Bud movie.  It makes the notion of wacky ghosts seem tedious.  And it distends time, making 100 minutes feel like 400.  And - I swear to God - it feels like they had to use the first and only take for a lot of the movie - screw it if everyone seems stilted and off.

That feeling may be because it's part of the early days of CGI.  Casper was the first CGI main character to exist in a movie.  And - to the film's credit - they nail that part.  It looks great.  But I doubt actors were used to the awkward acting one does against a tennis ball in 1995.  And who knows how long all of that took to set up?  It's literally possible they only had time for a few takes.

My feeling is that, after many drafts, they had several ideas and they decided to do little bits of all of them.   They tried to steal from the popular Addam's Family movie and have someone looking for a hidden treasure in Casper and the Ghostly Trio's frankly bad-ass mansion.  That Cathy Moriarty - our villain, because for some reason we need a villain - walks into what has to be a 10,000 square foot mansion with absolutely unique architecture and declares it a "dump" shows that the script and art director and everyone else are not on the same @#$%ing page.  And that is how the movie feels.

By turns, the movie seems aimed at adults.  The opening includes cameos by Father Guido Sarducci and Dan Aykroyd literally playing Ray Stantz.  There's a series of unnecessary cameos as Bill Pullam is transformed into Clint Eastwood, Rodney Dangerfield, and Mel Gibson (all of whom were probably delighted to spend a day being in a Casper movie). 

There's an Apocalypse Now reference, for example - and for middle schoolers, while presenting Casper as a seemingly sweet 8 year old - until the end of the movie where we find out he was 13 the whole time.  It's, sometimes, about a dad in mourning, a daughter embarrassed of her parent's career and shitty parenting.  It's about two cartoon dummies looking for "treasure".  It's about Casper being a tryhard with Christina Ricci - which seems terrifying in a way that's incredibly off-putting.  Like, your titular character sux super bad, and the pretty girl is supposed to smile and find it appealing.  But, word of warning: that dude is going to drag you down, young Christina Ricci.

In short - it's a bunch of stuff you've seen in other movies around this time stitched together into something where no one's arc really works, pays off, or demonstrates much in the way of growth.  Casper is essentially the same at beginning and end of the movie.  The Ghostly Trio just disappear for the last ten minutes for no reason.  The villain story just... ends.  I guess with the villains dead, which leaves the ownership of the house in a curious state.  And the movie explicitly states the house contains a machine that, with the right party punch, literally brings ghosts back to life.  Bill Pullman is sitting on a device of profound consequence - shattering the barrier between life and death.

But no one cares about that.  Why would you?  We have a middle-school dance and a reunion with a dead wife (who has no interest in seeing her daughter) to attend to.  

Because it's bits and pieces of other movies - they establish that they're in a Manor in Maine outside of a small town, but they could be literally anywhere.  The only benefit is some minor league leaf peeping we get to do.  Why a small town?  Doesn't matter.  Do we have a nod to Carrie with a vindictive "popular" girl trying to ruin Ricci's party?  Yes.  But aside from that - there's no point in her even going to school.  And, again - this is clearly one-part Addam's Family, one-part Carrie.  And probably one part every popular girl getting her comeuppance story in every movie of the 80's and 90's.

As was agreed upon while watching the movie, the best part of this movie is probably Cathy Moriarty's perfect hair.  And I think there's a really funny movie in there somewhere with no Bill Pullman and more of Moriarty and Idle - who are both terrible people.  The kinda goth-ish Lydia Deetz was just kind of a thing in movies for a while post-Burton, as was the struggling single parent omnipresent since the 1970's.  So... yeah.  I would have taken a movie without the kid and weird implications of an undead nice guy living in a teen's bedroom - especially as she gets older and he's always 13.  So - we could have skipped ALL of that, and maybe had a sort of funny comedy about Casper fucking up two goofs.  But, no.

At the end of the day, Casper is a terrible character to hang a movie on.  His only thing is being "nice", which is boring AF and not really a character trait.  It leaves him with doing nice things and people feeling weird watching him try, while his wildly entertaining uncles show what it means to embrace being a ghostly a-hole.  It's funny-ish!  And they're clearly having a good time.

Mostly - this movie is so dull it hurts.  I literally got a bit of a tummy ache watching the movie and realizing I had half a movie left to go.  I also took a potty break, did a chore and came back 5-7 minutes later, and have no idea what I missed as it seemed nothing had happened.  

God, Casper.  You just suck as a movie.

*And, in fact, one of my earliest memories is hiding behind the sofa in the middle of the day because the local TV station would run its tests of the Emergency Alert System in the middle of Casper.  So, I'm like 3 - can't really read - and am watching this ghost have a hard time of it with the living, who do not want to be his friend, and then this sound straight from Satan's butthole starts blasting from the TV and a voice like a robot that wants to murder me starts bleating out that this is a test of an EMERGENCY.

Anyway, my mom found me and eventually calmed me the @#$% down.