PLATFORM: NOW TV | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
School Spirits is a light-hearted ‘spooky’ movie aimed firmly at young teenagers. The story sees the character of Zoey move into a sleepy town where she swiftly fails to make friends. A rather rubbish first day at the new school leads to Zoey uncovering the town’s terrible secret; it’s full of ghosts. Teaming up with a couple of other local misfits they find themselves attempting ‘bust’ the local spooks.
The trio of teen girls includes Tera (the quirky one who leans toward the occult) and Morgan (the bossy, practical one). Zoey’s almost magical technical skills completes the trio of ghost hunters and as character dynamics go, it’s quite compelling. The performances are okay, but the script is average and the special effects are so dated and low-budget that at times this feels like something from the 1990s.
School Spirits feels more like a pilot for a fun TV show about a quirky band of high-school misfits who bust ghosts in their spare time than an actual movie. A lot of time is spent establishing the characters’ backstories and not enough on the actual plot. Various characters and story elements are set up in the first act only to not really pay off later.
The tone is doesn’t quite work; as if no one could decide if this was a horror or a comedy. Alas it is neither; it isn’t very funny nor is it scary. So we get a school bully character who appears more sad and unstable than a genuine threat, a love interest who is hardly there and an extraneous ‘nosey neighbour’ comic-relief character that the movie mostly forgets about. Jokes fall flat, the spooky beats fail to land.
Like many low-budget movies, the storytelling is rather compressed and as a result the movie fails to engage its audience. The actors do very well with very little; giving it their all at every moment. School Spirits is a movie that could be so much better if it had decided what it wanted to be, which at very least gives it something in common with the teenage experience.
