The Blackwell Ghost (2017)
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: We all know there’s some truly weird stuff to be found on streaming services, but The Blackwell Ghost promises to be different. Amazon describes it as “An authentic documentary that shows actual ghost footage that was captured on camera.”
Mmmmkay. Grammar issues aside, these are some big promises. As Pepper Brooks so memorably said, “It’s a bold strategy, Cotton, Let’s see if it pays off for ‘em.”
In a nutshell, filmmaker and professed skeptic, Turner Clay wants to prove that ghosts are real, so he sets out to dig deeper into a ghost-sighting video that went viral. His first lead, John, ghosts him (see what I did there?) and the trail goes cold, but two years later he finds out about a house in Pennsylvania that’s supposedly haunted.
Turner and his wife, Terri, fly to Pennsylvania in their cute little single-engine plane to meet Greg, who’s spent decades in his childhood home but is somehow only just now noticing ghostly activity. He takes Turner all over the house and tells him how the ghost will open doors and turn on lamps, but stays out of his bedroom. He also shows Turner the well in the basement, where an evil reclusive woman, Ruth Blackwell, used to stuff her murder victims. He says it has a pretty foul odor, but the cover is still propped open because reasons.
When Greg goes out of town for a couple of months, he invites Turner and Terri to come stay in his house and see the hauntings for themselves. Turner jumps at it; Terri is less than excited, but she goes along. They plant static night vision cameras in random locations around the place (outside the bedroom, for one) and stay three nights. Things happen. Turner swears it’s all real.
Heh. I watched The Blackwell Ghost with my son, and it didn’t take ten minutes before we both realized that it’s a lot of flimflam. The best thing I can say about this film is that the editing and sound are done well. Other than that, it’s dismal.
For instance, it wouldn’t have killed Turner to at least try to look credible as a paranormal investigator, but there are so many painfully obvious gaffes in this movie that it’s laughable, like those static night vision cameras. If Turner was really trying to capture the ghost on film, why would he put a camera in front of the bedroom, the one place the ghost never goes to?
Or when Turner supposedly measures the depth of the well, he doesn’t put a weight on the string, so the string is just floating on the surface of the water. Plenty of people have pointed out that the supposed well isn’t even a well but a big bowl filled with water.
Or the lights turning on an off. It’s the easiest thing in the world to put lights on timers, so to have one go on and off while a camera happens to be filming isn’t a huge stretch.
Or when Turner says the ghost is messing with their recording equipment and they can’t charge any of their devices. Then how is it that he’s been able to film for three days straight without a break?
Even his documentary subjects are fake. Like that dude, John, who supposedly made the viral video from the beginning of the film is actually Turner. The video is posted on Turner’s YouTube channel, jimmynut22.
Plus Greg is played by Sonny Burnette, who not only has a sizeable filmography of shorts and TV movies under his belt but is a prolific musician and professor of music, working with such artists as Bob Hope, Amy Grant, and Andrae Crouch. The really obvious conclusion is that his house is definitely not haunted. It doesn’t even belong to him but to Turner. Heck, it’s not even in Pennsylvania.
It’s really tacky of Turner to present this documentary as real when it isn’t and it’s even tackier of Amazon to allow him to continue the charade, because it’s both false advertising and insulting. However, continue Turner has, as The Blackwell Ghost now has five sequels.
The Blackwell Ghost is currently streaming on Amazon. Not rated.
My grade: F
Principal cast: Turner Clay, Sonny Burnette, Terry Czapleski
Directed by Turner Clay