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Casper: A spirited beginning

Threat advisory: Guarded - General risk of entertaining activities

Movie propaganda

Casper: A spirited beginning tells the story of how Casper first meets his ghostly trio uncles. After falling off a packed train populated with new-born ghostly inhabitants on their way to ghost central station, a training centre for new spirits, Casper finds himself lost in deeds town, a sleepy New England USA, community where, much to his bewilderment, everyone he meets runs away when he tries to ask for help; you see, Casper is not sure who he is or where he came from.

Casper soon befriends a kindred spirit in the human form of Chris Carson, a lonely but imaginative 10-year-old boy who's not afraid of ghosts. In fact his only friends are three fiendishly wicked ghosts who haunt the condemned Applegate mansion, that his workaholic father, Tim (Steve Guttenberg) wants to demolish and turn into a mini-mall, and which his activist schoolteacher fights to preserve as an historic monument.

Cinematic intelligence sources

Studios and distributors:

20th Century Fox

Intelligence analyst

Special Agent Matti

Theatrical report

If you have a violent aversion to letting your kids eat McDonald's, then you would do well to steer away from this flick: it is definitely at the fast food end of the scale.

Plastic is another word that springs to mind. Ready to wear. Just add water. Hackneyed. Formulaic. Clichéd.

There are no surprises. The acting is as wooden as the make-up. The dialogue was stripped straight off the cob. There is a reason for films going straight to video, and you know what it is.

Having gotten that off my chest, the 50,000 kids who were at the special preview (with face painting, the stars of Agro's cartoon connection, hot dogs, jelly, balloons, prizes) mostly seemed to enjoy it, especially the younger ones (but they were excited just at the thought of Casper, not because the film was particularly entertaining). Time for some quality time with the family rather than TV as babysitter.

Security censorship classification

PG (Supernatural theme)

Surveillance time

91 minutes (1:31 hours)

Not for public release in Australia before date

DVD rental: 20 March 2002
DVD retail: 14 August 2002
VHS retail: 14 August 2002