I Heard You Call My Name (1998)

Posted by Mrs Giggles on October 30, 2020 in 2 Oogies, Idiot Box Reviews, Series: Ghost Stories

I Heard You Call My Name (1998)

Main cast: Catalina Lago, R Ward Duffy, Austin Coon, Maggie Fine, and Rip Torn (Narrator)
Director: Greg Francis

Finally, the final episode ever in Ghost Stories is here. I Heard You Call My Name is, appropriately enough, an encapsulation of everything the series has been. One, I can’t recall the names of the lead characters, the credits and IMDB don’t care, and hence, I guess I won’t care as well. Nobody cares! Just like how nobody cares to remember this show!

The lead character’s husband calls her “Honey” anyway, so let’s just call her that too. For once, the show wisely contains their final episode ever into something more manageable—they don’t have to deal with CGIs and other elements beyond their budget after blowing what’s left onto renting the seaside property for the filming of this episode.

This episode is more of a supernatural drama than horror anyway, as it deals with Honey’s mourning after failing to save her son from drowning. Since then, she spends her days wrapped up in grief, looking at the sea that took her son’s life every day and doing not much else. Her husband, played by the same guy that played another husband in Green-Eyed Monster, is mad because it has been a year—how dare she doesn’t move on. Indeed, this episode agrees. It keeps throwing pregnant women at Honey’s face, and everything else in this episode is contrived to get Honey to stop mourning. If that’s not enough, she starts hearing her son’s voice in her head.

The son’s voice thing is the only somewhat gentle and kind effort of the script to get Honey to move past her grief. Everything else feels like an act of bullying, making me wonder whether the script writer and everyone else involved this show understand that different people grieve differently. There is no correct way to mourn, and there is certainly no correct period of mourning. Some people do it quickly, others need time, and that is okay. The only thing to watch out for is when grief compels a person to commit self-destructive behaviors.

Here, though, the message of the day is simply bitch, one year is up, get the hell over it. My eyes roll up so frequently throughout this episode, and I soon come to become annoyed by the other characters, especially that husband that comes off far too frequently as an insensitive clod.

It also doesn’t help that the acting is, as usual, lamentable. The actress playing Honey may have some excuse, as heaven knows, her character isn’t meant to be the life of the party. The guy playing her husband, though, is so flat that it seems like he can only chew scenery when it comes to his “acting” abilities. Everyone else is here to deliver their lines like they are reading aloud these lines for the first time, and really, they can’t wait to get their paycheck and scram.

All in all, I Heard You Call My Name is basically Ghost Stories in a nutshell: a script that more often than not misses the mark as well as the point, bad acting all around, and death of possibilities due to budget restrictions.

Real talk: even after 44 episodes, the show never succeeds in being anything more than some The Asylum-tier version of better spooky anthology shows out there. It tries very hard to be those series, even having scripts that borrow from those shows only in a “Yeah, got these scripts from their reject bins!” way, but it never succeeds in getting off the ground even at the very bitter end. Is this show someone’s vanity project or just some miserable effort at cashing in on a trend? I don’t know, maybe I will never know, and I don’t care to know because Ghost Stories honestly isn’t worth the effort when there are better shows out there.

Anyway, I’m done and I’m finally free of this show! Catch you guys on another show, hopefully a better one than this interminable showcase of low-budget mediocrity.

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