Awfully Good Movies: Ghost Dad (Video)

February 2nd 2018, 11:17am

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Ghost Dad (1990)

Director: Sidney Poitier Cast: Bill Cosby, Kimberly Russell, Denise Nicholas

With Helen Mirren facing off against a house of haunts in the true-life ghost story WINCHESTER, Awfully Good Movies is taking a look at a far scarier ghost movie that's scary for all the wrong reasons: GHOST DAD, starring…look, you know good and goddamn well who it stars. But back in the year 1990, the name Bill Cosby had far more pleasant connotations to it, so much so that Cosby was able to do another movie comedy in the wake of LEONARD PART 6's crash-and-burn just three years prior. This time, however, Cosby called on his old pal Sidney Poitier to sit in the director's seat, seeing as Poitier directed and co-starred alongside Cosby in three beloved buddy comedies back in the 70s. But in front of the camera, Cosby was on his own this time, playing a single dad businessman who gets killed by a demented satanist taxi driver (don't ask) and returns to his three kids as a ghost. Now Ghost Dad must help his kids get some life insurance from his workplace before he ascends to the heavens in a few days, though he does have plenty of time to get into some haunting hijinks along the way. And for those of you wondering if rewatching Cosby's work feels awkward in light of what we know now, I'd like to inform you this film has a scene of Cosby threatening to assault a child if the boy tells anybody about Cosby's "secret". So…yeah. Feels a little awkward to write jokes around that. Still, this is a fascinatingly terrible mess of a movie, whether or not you've seen it before "Cosby-Gate", and I can definitively say it is the worst film ever directed by a Bahamian ambassador to Japan.