Girl Haunts Boy was a possibility for spooky season since, y’know: Ghosts. But it looked more like a dopey rom-com so I put it off. But Netflix beckons and on my way to catching up with all the non-spooky movies I skipped during October, I hit play on this one. Which pretty much just deepens my reign of bad post-Halloween watches.

Girl Haunts Boy is about a teen who moves into an old house and how he encounters a cute girl who died in the ’20 (the 1920s, that is). She doesn’t know a hundred years have passed (or maybe she does?) so they bond over music and other stuff like Amelia Earhart, school, and… ugh… not as much as you’d think.

This flick is really more a time travel / fish-out-of-water comedy… mainly because the writer borked up the script and couldn’t decide if she’d been a ghost for a hundred years or not. They show her meeting new people moving into the house and then later say she doesn’t remember the passage of time. Make up your mind!

But here I am getting annoyed at the temporal / spiritual accuracy of Disney level rom-com. We can ignore the logic and just grouse about how bad the movie covers music. She loved music and name drops some old timey players and he teaches her about The Beatles, David Bowie, jazz, and punk. But the film doesn’t have the budget to license any of these artists. The movie could have been so much more fun mixing in the history of music and given us a cool soundtrack. And I’m not nitpicking since they were the ones who made music integral to the plot. To paraphrase Steve Martin… talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

But fine… how is the romance and how is the comedy? Also not great but at least the sole thing that glues the movie together. She’s cute and they seem moderately cute together. But none of its unique or original once you get past the gimmicks. They even botch a Great Gatsby theme (since, again, 1920s) and a sequence where they could have danced the Charleston (since she’s a flapper).

This is just a bad Netflix rom-com. It’s not egregiously bad… it has some cute moments here and there but never does enough with its ideas. Or the plot or themes. It’s just a bad movie.

Score: 66