Ghostmates
Dumb comedy full of gross-out humor and sex.
Ghostmates
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A Lot or a Little?
The parents' guide to what's in this movie.
What Parents Need to Know
Parents need to know that Ghostmates is a 2016 YouTube Red comedy in which a man who has recently died must right some of the people he has wronged to get to heaven. This character dies when his tie gets stuck in the front door of his apartment and he chokes to death; while struggling to free himself, his pants fall down and he hits the TV remote control, which turns on a pornographic movie, and so when his body is found, he's believed to have died of autoerotic asphyxiation. Cheap jokes are mined from this act for the rest of the movie. A chemistry teacher given the name "Dick Blowman" by the lead character when he was in high school has disrespectful students asking him, "What's it like to blow a man?" Carrots are compared to African-American penises. One of the lead character defecates in his pants. He is also discovered to have bottles of urine in his car from when he lived in his car. Overall, this is a poorly-made movie with a trite premise and shoddy execution.
Community Reviews
There’s some swearing and much more sexual humor than most of Smosh’s videos, but it’s a perfectly fine movie.
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Lighthearted and Amusing
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What's the Story?
After his girlfriend breaks up with him, Ed (Ian Hecox) dies when his tie gets stuck in the front door of his apartment in GHOSTMATES. While struggling to break free, his pants fall down and he hits the on-button of the TV remote control and a porno movie comes on. When his body is found, he is believed to have died from autoerotic asphyxiation. The next occupant of his apartment, a struggling cartoonist named Charlie (Anthony Padilla), discovers Ed and is the only one who can see him. Ed doesn't want to leave the apartment, and tries to make peace with Charlie by taking him to see T-Pain read Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" at an exclusive party. But when Ed and Charlie accidentally kill T-Pain and Ed watches him ascend into heaven, Ed realizes that he is trapped on Earth and, according to T-Pain, will stay down there until he rights those he has wronged, including his high school chemistry teacher, his father, and his girlfriend.
Is It Any Good?
This is an unfunny, poorly-made movie that takes a trite premise and turns it into a collection of predictable jokes. Even ideas that have potential to be funny -- a Law & Order parody with zombies, for instance, or T. Pain reading Poe's "The Raven" -- are so lazily done, they're as half-baked as everything else with this movie. The pacing is incompetent, the production level amateurish, and the attempts at humor are forced.
Ghostmates is one of many examples of what is apparently a YouTube Red film collection entitled "Movies That Never Should Have Been Made." It's also another example of performers who might be "YouTube famous" proving themselves utterly incapable of crossing over into other and longer forms of entertainment. Simply put, this is just an awful movie.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about ghost movies. How is Ghostmates similar to and different from other ghost movies?
What are some of the ways in which this movie attempts to be funny through parody, gross-out, and one-liners?
What's the appeal of juvenile humor?
Movie Details
- On DVD or streaming: December 14, 2016
- Cast: Ian Hecox, Anthony Padilla, Francesca Galassi
- Director: Jack Henry Robbins
- Studio: YouTube
- Genre: Comedy
- Run time: 85 minutes
- MPAA rating: NR
- Last updated: July 2, 2022
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