Bill Cosby's Ghost Dad is Misleadingly Titled, Terrible

Bill Cosby’s crimes have hopelessly tainted and corrupted everything he’s touched professionally. It’s impossible to see a light-hearted supernatural romp like Ghost Dad outside the context of its star’s notorious double life as a public Saint and scold (in his mind, the two go hand in hand) and private sinner. 

These days, if we choose to look at Cosby’s work at all, which is a very big if, we see an American Jimmy Savile whose crimes stagger the mind instead of America’s goofy, pudding pops-and-life-lessons-dispensing dad. We’re looking at a criminal, a deviant, someone who took horrible advantage of their lofty status in the world and our adoration to abuse the vulnerable for decades. 

That’s made it hard to even watch Cosby’s work today let alone laugh at his hijinks or root for him. That’s true of The Cosby Show, his magnum opus and the show that made him one of our most beloved and revered celebrities before he became one of our most hated and reviled. 

That’s doubly true of gimmicky garbage like 1990’s Ghost Dad, which typecast Cosby as Elliott Hooper, a widower struggling to reconcile his responsibilities to his family and his obligations at an office where he’s a suspiciously long in the tooth young man on the go (he’s in line to become the youngest man on the company board despite clearly being in his fifties) about to win the big promotion and the car when the merger goes through. 

Yes, Elliott Hooper is totally going to do a business, with all of the reports and the meetings and proposals. His mind is so focussed on doing vaguely business stuff with white men in suits that he forgets his daughter’s birthday. That, friends, is a capital crime in Bad Dad Redemption movies like this. 

The Bad Dad Redemption genre is pitiless. Miss a birthday or skip a little league game just because you have to make your closing statement in your client’s murder trial? Well then, I hope you enjoy being dead or having a whole bunch of weird magical powers that collectively teach you to be a better dad and person, because that’s what lies in your immediate future. 

Elliott is so obsessed with that dumb merger that closes on Thursday and will completely provide for his family’s future for decades to come that he forgets his resentful teen daughter’s birthday and is swiftly and correctly punished with a watery death when his taxi plummets off a bridge and he’s rewarded with a whole bunch of weird magical powers that collectively teach him to be a better dad and person. 

The overpaid screenwriters of the oddly deathless Bad Dad Supernatural Redemption comedy assume, for some reason, that the small, easily entertained children who are their target audience have an endless fascination with business, and can never hear enough talk of mergers and meetings and acquisitions. Maybe that’s because they tend to have a lot more money than audiences and for them meetings can lead to big checks and screenwriting assignments and new movies, not just headaches, tedium and wasted time. 

Accordingly, Ghost Dad is perhaps the first movie ever to pose a question of interest only to a goth insurance adjuster: could a ghost pass a physical that would satisfy an insurance company to the point that they’d offer him a policy? 

Ghost Dad answers that never-pondered question with, “Yes, but some chicanery would of course have to be involved if the dead were to attempt to successfully impersonate the living for the sake of providing for their family’s future in their absence.” In order to successfully pass the physical, Ghost Dad needs to pass off a tape recording of a heartbeat as the real thing, pretends a medical-grade skeleton is his own when receiving an X-ray and, in the maraschino cherry atop the triple decker sundae of labored physical comedy awfulness this endless set- piece represents, steals urine from a disbelieving old white man because presumably he can’t urinate any more than he can maintain an erection and achieve orgasm. 

In Ghost Dad, if you die you kind of just keep on going at about 80 percent effectiveness for a couple of days so you can wrap your affairs. Sometimes you fall through floors. Sometimes trains travel right through your body but don’t worry, you can still communicate with pretty much everybody, from the creepy neighborhood kid who wants to blackmail you because he thinks you’re a space alien to your still-alive fuck buddy. 

Ghost Dad establishes that its title character has at most three days left on earth to wrap up all his affairs and provide for his family’s future, not to mention learn to be a better man and father. Yet his kids seem incredibly non-sentimental considering that they’re ostensibly experiencing their final 72 hours with their dead father in any form. If I were Ghost Dad and the little shits were sulking around and saying things like “I guess helping is not your strong suit these days!” because I can’t come to their stupid magic show because I’m too busy making money I would shake them by their shoulders and yell into their mopey faces, “I fucking DIED a watery death. I’m DEAD for eternity. I’m a GHOST! A fucking GHOST! Maybe we could have a fucking meaningful conversation in the six hours I have left instead of you watching the TGI Friday line- up.” 

In order to be satisfying, movies like this that deal light-heartedly in the supernatural and the afterlife have to have clear, understandable rules that are adhered to and consistently applied. That’s not Ghost Dad. Here, the rules of the afterlife change wildly from scene to scene, depending on what the filmmakers need at any given moment. So Ghost Dad tends to be invisible in bright light but is not only visible but corporeal when office lights are dim. And he can do business presentations and hand out reports in business meetings, and strangle people after traveling through telephone wires but he cannot have sexual intercourse, as love interest Joan learns when she proposes a little “Afternoon Delight” with the formerly living business dynamo and he demurs for understandable reasons. 

Learning that a man she recently tried to seduce is a ghost inspires Joan to utter a line that belongs in the pantheon of great-bad dialogue: “I thought you were afraid of intimacy! I didn’t know you were deceased!” 

I’m not sure the fact that Ghost Dad contains that line alone justifies the film’s existence or if it should have single-handedly ensured that a screenplay this idiotic never got read in its entirety, let alone made. 

The only other line that matches “I thought you were afraid of intimacy! I didn’t know you were deceased!” for sheer bonkers crackpot inspiration is when Ghost Dad’s daughter’s asshole boyfriend, a weird white amalgam of skater and punk and proto-grunge fashions calls up the Hopper household and, after insouciantly asking, “Yo, is Diane there, this is Tony Richter?”, clarifying, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s me. Put the bitch on.” 

Ghost Dad is so apoplectic that he straight-up leaps through the phone on some Shocker type shit and indignantly yells at Tony Richter, “Put the bitch on the phone!!? Put the bitch on the phone!?!” in a way that suggests that he feels that the young man has seriously broached telephone etiquette by haughtily demanding to talk to a “bitch” who happens to be the daughter of the man on the other end of the phone line. 

By that point Ghost Dad has already established that Diane loves Tony’s boorishness so much that she might actually think that referring to her as a bitch was sexy and cool in a bad boy, outlaw kind of way. After all, in an earlier scene she did respond very favorably to Tony waggling his tongue obscenely at her in a manner seemingly designed to establish that he is enthusiastic and skilled at performing cunnilingus. 

The only thing that could make the line “I thought you were afraid of intimacy! I didn’t know you were deceased!” more sublimely idiotic would be if it were somehow untrue, if ghost dad was not, in fact, ghost dead, or a ghost at all. 

In possibly the most insulting and worst twist of all time, it turns out that Ghost Dad isn't dead. Nope! Not at all! Instead we learn that Ghost Dad didn’t die in the taxi crash. Rather, he hovered in a state of limbo between life and death, one where he could nevertheless presumably do all sorts of tacky shit like steal an old dude’s urine for the sake of passing a physical for a life insurance company and physically menace his daughter’s boyfriend. 

No, no, no. I call bullshit. I’m sorry, but this is false advertising. This is a bait and switch. You cannot make a movie called Ghost Dad about a dad who isn’t a ghost because he’s not dead! That’s lying to your audience. That’s manipulating your audience. That’s cheating your audience and for what, the comic nirvana of watching a fake-ghost pass a physical and cos-play as The Invisible Man? 

This isn’t Ghost Dad. This is Near Death Experience Surviving Dad. Nobody wants to see that. Nobody wanted to see Ghost Dad either but at least its title has a little pulpy, tacky panache. 

Mr. Cosby, you are a monster. You sold innocent, unsuspecting people tickets to a movie called Ghost Dad where you played the titular posthumous papa and then it turned you weren’t dead, or a ghost after all, just in a coma-like state. That is unforgivable and while Cosby’s transgressions against film aren’t in the same ballpark as his sexual crimes I take some small comfort in knowing that this turkey helped land its otherwise extraordinarily successful star in Movie Jail decades before he entered the real thing. 

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