Film
Casper
- Director
- Brad Silberling
- Certificate
- PG
- Running Time
- 100 mins
Gold-digging Carrigan Crittenden (Cathy Moriarty) finds that her newly inherited labyrinthine pile is haunted by big-eyed and lonesome spook Casper, plus his trio of prankstering uncles – Fatso, Stinky and Stretch – who manage to scare off sundry exorcists, Ghostbusters (“Who ya gonna call? Somebody else!”) and construction workers. Enter Dr. James Harvey (Bill Pullman), a self-styled therapist for the “living impaired” and his long-suffering daughter Kat (Christina Ricci), neither of whom has ever actually seen a ghost. Crittenden gives them a couple of weeks to get rid of the spooks, but all doleful Casper wants – sniff! – is a chum, while his uncles delight in winding up the air-sucking bonebag who’s so keen to counsel them.
https://youtu.be/unyb6UTyl_U
Despite a sickly conclusion, Casper delivers a mix of computer animation, plenty of pratfalls and sight gags for the nippers, and a rich vein of adult humour to keep their grown-up companions entertained. It’s not as dark or funny and obscenely talented Ricci’s previous big scary house flick Addams Family Values, since the potentially gloomy business of death is tackled in typically saccharine Spielbergian style. Dr. Harvey explains that ghosts are merely dead people with “unfinished business”, while Casper reveals that dying is “like being born, only backwards”: an image upon which it is probably unwise to dwell.
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