DVD Review: Ghost Hunters International - Season One Part 1

The SyFy Channel series Ghost Hunters has ruined all other paranormal reality shows for me. Unlike most other shows of its ilk, on Ghost Hunters a team of investigators travel to a supposedly haunted location and try to debunk the stories that anything paranormal is actually happening there. The result is reassurance when they are able find a conventional explanation to a wild story, but when they can't or instead uncover something paranormally fascinating, their evidence becomes all the more remarkable. The fact that they focus on hard evidence, the kind that would turn a skeptic into a believer, is and has been refreshing ever since the show first aired.

Apparently I'm not the only one to feel this way, as the show has become successful enough to warrant spin-offs, like Ghost Hunters International. While Ghost Hunters focuses its attention mostly (though not entirely) on U.S. haunts on the east coast, GHI was created to allow a second team to run all over the world exploring locations with much longer histories.

There are plenty of familiar faces on GHI due to the fact that many of the investigators that make up the GHI team began as regulars on Ghost Hunters, including Andy Andrews, Dustin Pari, Barry Fitzgerald, Donna La Croix and Brian Harnois, who is perhaps best known for his exclamation of "Dude, run!" during an investigation. Kris Williams fills in on one investigation in the episode "Castle of the Damned" and Ghost Hunters hosts Grant Wilson and Jason Hawes pop up a couple times to make brief cameos.

The format of GHI is nearly identical to that of the original series: a group of investigators get briefed on a reportedly haunted location via a tour; they set up their equipment and stay at the location overnight, using video and audio equipment to try and catch whatever activity they can; they review the evidence and then report back with their findings. The elements that differ about GHI from Ghost Hunters are both the shows biggest strength and weakness, respectively: older, more varied locations, and less charismatic hosts.

Article Author: Sombrero Grande

This writer is a member of The Masked Movie Snobs, a collective that fights a never-ending battle against bad entertainment.

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