Ghost Dad - 1990 Review

How could people like Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier (who directed) make a movie as poor as this one?

In the beginning of the movie Cosby plays a single dad (widower) who works too hard and has three children, one is a a teenage Diane (Kimberly Russell).  All kinds of good thing hinge upon a deal he hopes to close on Thursday.   Then Cosby dies in a fatal cab accident and becomes a ghost.

But in movies like this you have to establish what the ghost can and can not do.  Who can hear or see the ghost,  can the ghost walk through walls,  move things or people around,  appear to people  etc. etc.

Well sometimes he can do things and sometimes he can't.   Sometimes he can pick things up for instance and sometimes he can't  and it seems to be madeup for no purpose as the movie goes on.   Actually the purpose seems to be so we can get a close-up of Cosby making a funny face, or trying to make a funny face.    You give up trying to make sense of anything pretty fast in this movie.   But  we aren't laughing or having fun.

There's a scene where Cosby puts on clothes so that his business associates can see him and won't think he's a ghost.  Instead of talking to his business associates to get the deal going and make sure his kids will have money to survive, he decides to go and talk to the next door neighbor.     I can't tell you why he does this or why it is in the movie....  it doesn't make sense, and it's not a well written scene.  

The movie goes from stupid to some place far far  beyond.    Someone else in the family becomes a ghost, likes being a ghost and it leads to one of the worst scenes in a movie already stacked with bad scenes.

What was Bill Cosby thinking when he made this?   Didn't Sidney Poitier see the film he was making and realize how awful it was?   Cosby is so natural and so good and has such great comic timing on his television show, it's like some imitator has taken over his body determined to destroy his career by being relentlessly unfunny in a very bad movie.

Ghost Dad  1990  Directed by Sidney Poitier