Watched: 04/27/2025
Format: Tubi
Viewing: First
Director: Alin Bijan
Goodnight Lane is a very real street in northwest Dallas, where the Ghost of Goodnight Lane (2014) takes place, and was filmed, at least in part. And if there's one spooky thing in this world, it is Dallas sprawl and suburbs.
The best thing about this movie is that Billy Zane is having a good time. He knows what this movie is, and he's just happy to be there and dick around. And, really, this movie is just an excuse for the filmmakers to have a good time and make a low-stakes horror-comedy. It is silly. It knows it's silly. It is critic and taste proof. If you don't like it, that's kind of on you, audience. And the fact this exists in this form is proof I don't know how movie-making works.
The Ghost of Goodnight Lane is weirdly full of B to Z list working actors out of LA. I say this, because this movie has the vibe that it doesn't feel like it should have anyone in it but local talent from the DFW area. But it has Billy Zane and Lacey Chabert. And still manages to look like a movie shot by people playing with equipment more than a movie that came out in 2014. Like, it's weird to see real actors in set-ups and with lighting I associate with movies made by folks usually casting their pals, just something fun to enter into horror film festivals.
It's maybe not Ouija Shark bad, but...
So I wonder about the proposition for getting the financing - provided our writer/ director didn't finance himself. Did they blow it all on getting who they got? The FX? Which are brief but pretty okay for what this is?
Billy Zane may not have the heat of Timothy Chalamet, but he's been a known actor since before Titanic. Our reason for watching this movie, Lacey Chabert, was well known in 2014. And other actors in this had been the star of a whole-ass TV show, like Matt Dallas who I believe was the titular Kyle of Kyle XY. Danielle Harris was in The Last Boyscout as Bruce Willis's kid. Even the guy who played Buddy Revell in Three O'Clock High is in this.
Why did they film this movie in Dallas, if, indeed, they did? Surely it cost a lot to fly everyone in and put them up. But that's like asking "why did they make this movie?", which I cannot answer. But I get the feeling that some dentists and pediatrists in Dallas were told that if they spent money on this movie, they'd get to meet Gretchen Weiners. And who among us would not be talked into that?
The story is that a movie production company owns a small house that includes offices, editing suites, a kitchen and studio space. When the ghost living in the house catches wind that they will sell the house and the place will be demolished, our tween ghost begins murdering people. Why? I do not know. That will not slow down the engines of capitalism.
The ghost is, as I say, a tween girl with a multitude of ghostly powers, basically whatever the script requires for a grisly death - possession, telekinesis, flickering lights, scaring dogs... There are occasional CG bits with her and lots of jump-cut sorts of things.
Zane plays the producer of a T&A+guns movie - I'm guessing loosely based on the Dallas-based Malibu Bay production company run by Andy Sidaris.* The movie has fun with how dumb movie-making can feel in the moment. Example: I enjoyed the re-shoots for product placement.
Chabert plays an assistant producer, I think. I dunno. It doesn't matter. She's basically "girl who is not crazy, ghost or Hollywood dimwit". I always try to gauge her performance, but I think in this we can all agree, she is definitely in this movie and getting a paycheck. She's fine. No complaints. But she is not exactly given the most challenging stuff to do.
The movie also features plentiful flashbacks to people in iffy late 1960's garb because as it turns out, we need BACKSTORY to our ghost. And the ghost girl's father is none other than... bum bum BUMMMM... Charles Manson.
Look, I don't want to get into it. It's just odd. Like the writer/director was just grabbing ideas out of the ether. But making a movie that's kind of a comedy and then bringing Charles Manson into it isn't too soon, maybe - but it just isn't particularly funny.
Is it stupid?
I mean, it knows it is. So what's the point of going on about it?
Did I love it? No. Did I like it? Not really. It's neither scary or particularly funny except for Zane.
It wanders, much as this post is doing. It's not hard to follow, but you may wonder why you should follow it. It doesn't help that I was watching reviews of Re-Animator and thinking about what Stuart Gordon was doing with his budget and sense of humor and what happened here.
I get making something campy for fun, but once I had the budget for a Billy Zane and Lacey Chabert, I think I'd want to kick it up a notch.
We know from our other viewing that this is just as Chabert's Hallmark/ family-movie/ romance-movie career is about to take off like a rocket. This is, in fact, the second-to-last of her films like this, The Lost Tree being the final one - and I suspect that one was in editing for a very, very long time. So who knows when she shot which.
Oddly, there's a mid-credits sequence coda that has the best shot in the whole film. Why that wasn't the movie, I don't know.
*and if you have never see the output of Malibu Bay, it is a thing to behold. We recommend Hard Ticket to Hawaii as a good entry-level example. RIP, Mr. Sidaris.
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