Casper **** (1995, Bill Pullman, Christina Ricci, Cathy Moriarty, Eric Idle) – Classic Movie Review 840

Steven Spielberg decides in 1995 to produce the live-action debut of beloved cartoon friendly ghost Casper. But casting young Christina Ricci, (once Wednesday in the Addams Family movies and now 15) as the heroine gives her an insuperable problem, because she has to play sugar and spice, when what she’s obviously good at is slugs and snails.

Bill Pullman, on the other hand, eternal hero’s friend in the movies, is cast to type as her amiable widowed dad sent to rid haunted Whipstaff Manor of a clutch of pesky spooks, headed by the treacly sweet Casper.

Although Casper looks pretty young and talks with a kid’s voice, he’s actually celebrating his 50th birthday, having begun a busy life in a 1945 cartoon called The Friendly Ghost, then appearing in two animated shorts, before emerging as a comic and telly series. As well as Casper, there’s a trio of ghosts well worth busting – Stretch, Stinkie and Fatso – much more promising for a bit of spirited knockabout fun.

Also promising are a duo of silly baddies among the mortals – Cathy Moriarty, a spunky American actress with a creepy resemblance to the young Faye Dunaway, as the greedy new owner of the manor, and our own Eric Idle, giving an idle slapstick turn as her oily lawyer sidekick, who, judging from his silly pratfalls and outrageous mugging, must be Jerry Lewis’s English cousin.

As if aware of the lack of star power, the producers have persuaded Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson, Rodney Dangerfield and Dan Aykroyd (sending up his Ghostbusters role) to put in daft cameo-ho-hos. The Industrial Light and Magic trickery (a process here called “Caspermatic”) looks like the kind we used to see in the bad old days before effects got special, with reliance on obvious puppets as well as cartoon figures over-laid later on different spaces of the screen from the one the actors are busy looking at.

The sets give that strangely cut-price look of an old Hammer horror, with the cardboard-looking spook house sitting in a dead-looking studio-bound “garden”, and the manor’s interior design needing an urgent refit.

Ten years earlier Steven Spielberg produced a couple of movies that he should have re-run to see how to put life into Casper. Why couldn’t it look as imaginative as Young Sherlock Holmes, or have the exuberance of The Goonies? Casper took much more at the box office than either of them, which just go to show: critics don’t have the ghost of a chance.

Based on the book Casper, the Friendly Ghost by Joseph Oriolo and Seymour Reit.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 840

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