Ghost Town (1988)

               It’s impossible to write about this movie without first explaining the nature of Empire Pictures and its founder Charles Band. For anyone familiar with the direct-to-video market of the 80’s and 90’s he was as inescapable as Roger Corman with somehow even more unnecessary sequels. I shouldn’t be using the past tense, he’s still out there shoveling out movies under the Full Moon Entertainment banner. Empire Pictures been defunct long enough to have earned itself a decent amount of nostalgia. It released some pictures that even normal people have heard of like ‘Troll’ and ‘Robot Jox.’ Some of them were even good. The company was founded in 1983 and, in a very similar fashion to The Cannon Group, tried to do too much too quickly and ran itself into the ground by 1988. The first version of Full Moon Entertainment sprang up and collapsed between 1995 and 2002 but it looks like he’s finally figured out a way to make his movie factory sustainable since the second version is still up and running to this day.

I mean, they didn't lie.

              ‘Ghost Town’is very much an example of the assembly-line process of movie making. If you survive in the industry for long enough you start to feel the rules of production in your bones. At that point filmmaking can turn into something very mechanical and predictable. You turn out a script with these restrictions, you secure these locations for this number of days, you hire a director who can bring things in on time and within budget, and finally you round up some actors who can hit their marks. The order of these steps can be random. The reason Band isn’t usually mentioned in the same breath as Roger Corman, who has a staggering amount of respect within the industry, is that he almost never lets himself get distracted by artistry. Corman went out of his way to seek out and develop new talent, allowing directors like Joe Dante and Peter Bogdanovich to take bold swings with style and content as long as they kept within their budgets. With Empire Pictures they did turn out some genuine genre classics in ‘Re-Animator’ and ‘From Beyond,’ but that was more a case where Stuart Gordon’s path happened to cross Band’s than anything intentional. Looking over the Full Moon catalogue I don’t see something like ‘Gingerdead Man vs. Evil Bong’ still getting deluxe reissues a couple decades after release.

              There really isn’t much to be said about either the crew or the cast. The director was Richard McCarthy, who according to IMDB had previously only done some filmed sequences for a Benny Hill movie in 1977. I’m sure this is a case where the internet has failed us as obscure Australian 70’s and 80’s tv shows might not be the best documented anymore. Mac Ahlberg is listed as an uncredited co-director, and since he was the long-term cinematographer for Empire Pictures as a whole I’m going to guess he stepped in to exert control over a troubled production. The story credit goes to David Schmoeller who wrote and directed a number of features for Empire including the original ‘Puppet Master.’ The script was by Duke Sandefur who wrote for some tv shows in the 90’s and is also one of three credited writers for 2012’s ‘Atlas Shrugged II: the Strike,’ so I’m sure he’s real fun at parties.

              The cast is mostly made up of career actors, the kind of people with the number of credited roles in the high double digits. Our hero, Langley, is played by Franc Luz, who spent the next decade knocking around tv shows. The other character who’s present for the entire movie, I’d be lying if I called her a main character, is Kate as played by Catherine Hickland. If you’re a fan of soaps you’re likely familiar with her work as the character Tess Wilder in 469 episodes across the ‘Loving’ / ‘The City’ televisual universe and Lindsay Rappaport for 145 episodes in ‘One Life to Live.’ The villain, Devlin, is played by Jimmie F. Skaggs in his first film role. He doesn’t really impress, so I can’t say I’m surprised he spent the rest of his career doing mostly bit parts. There’s also a minor character called The Dealer whose role in the movie is so unclear and underdeveloped I’m not even mad about it, just sincerely confused, and he’s played by Bruce Glover. He played an assassin in ‘Diamonds are Forever’ and Grady Coker in the ‘Walking Tall’ films. I’m not going to criticize anyone’s acting too much because what can you do with material like this?

              Here is the entire plot of the movie: cowboy ghosts kidnap a woman, a local deputy goes looking for her and finds a town filled with ghosts who can’t go to the afterlife until the bad guy dies, the deputy kills the bad guy and he and the woman escape the town, the end. I left out remarkably little in that summary. The only even semi-interesting scenes I skipped were a sex scene and … and I think that’s it. It wasn’t even a very good sex scene. They can’t even be original with a structure this simple, the end just directly rips off huge chunks of ‘A Fistful of Dollars.’

              The premise is at least established relatively quickly: we open on a red convertible tearing down a dirt road. Camera cuts to the driver who’s a young woman smiling brightly. She grabs a wedding veil from the passenger seat and tosses it into the air with a whoop. Runaway bride, got it. She hears invisible horses surround her car. She pulls over to figure it out, a fog bank appears containing horses and she’s grabbed and spirited away. Takes less than four minutes, let’s go.

              Cut to our assigned hero Langley. He wanders around a junkyard wearing headphones, posing and taking potshots at garbage. He’s a good shot but that’s still all he’s doing. Then a radio goes off and reveals that he’s a cop, so there go any good feelings towards him. His chief informs him about Kate running away from the wedding and that her rich and powerful father is forcing them to look for her. There’s a report of a helicopter spotting the car by the side of the road (no footage, this production couldn’t afford a real helicopter) so he heads over to check it out. He spots some horse tracks and follows them along until a masked man on a black horse shoots at him. While he’s shooting back his car spontaneously catches on fire. He scrambles out and the horseman is gone. He has a hat, a shotgun, and nothing else as he’s stranded in the desert. He wanders for a little bit before stumbling across a wooden memorial mostly covered by dirt. He scrapes it off and it says that a sheriff was murdered there in 1870. For some reason this makes Langley move the memorial and start digging around in the ground, which of course triggers the zombie to sit up and start jabbering at him. His lines, in their entirety: “You’re the one. You’ll rid my town of evil. Don’t fail or risk a fate worse than death. Go now.” Then he lays back down. Whole speech took eight seconds.

              That is the last interesting thing that happens for a full fifteen minutes. Langely wanders towards the town, he wanders into the town, through the town, through a bar, through a house, he wanders a lot. He talks to a couple of people who disappear the second he looks away and it’s still going to be another twenty minutes before he figures out there are ghosts. Eventually he meets a blacksmith and a young woman staying with him and something like a plot starts to happen. While he’s talking to them, asking if they have a phone and stupid questions like that, a couple of guys who are clearly outlaw cowboys come over and threaten him with their guns. They use words at each other for a little bit then Langley shoots them dead and has his forehead grazed by a bullet.

There have been higher-budgeted movies.

              He wakes up in bed with the young woman, who has a name but who cares, she’s going to be dead soon. They have sex because of course they do. While that’s happening we cut back to the real world where Langley’s chief is concerned. He never shows up again so don’t worry about it. We then finally cut over to Kate a full 35 minutes into the movie. She’s set up in an upstairs room at the hotel slash saloon. The moment she steps outside she’s suddenly surrounded by outlaw cowboy ghosts. She retreats back to her room and soon we hear thumping steps coming towards her. It’s Devlin, who’s finally revealed to the audience to be a guy with a bullet hole through each cheek and slightly green skin. He’s not an interesting villain, he’s just an asshole. He’s also one of those old-west bad guys who swans around talking faux-fancy, so we’re going to mostly ignore him for the rest of the movie. It’s confirmed later that he’s been sexually assaulting Kate, not going to dwell on that.

              While he’s asleep post-banging Langley dream-witnesses the day that apparently cursed the town. It’s the Old West and the sheriff is running around town asking the citizens to help him confront Devlin. Since they all refuse he calls them cowards and decides to take the gang down all by himself. He doesn’t and they kill him, but he does put a shot through one side of Devlin’s face and out of the other so there’s that. Langley sees the woman he just boned pick up the sheriff’s gun and carry it off, which will be important shortly. He wakes up and asks the woman how she’s still around, and here is all the explanation the movie gives for what’s going on: “Smith and me, ones like us are trapped somehow. The others, the voices you hear in the night, are souls lost between heaven and hell, I think.” And that is IT. There are going to be some very inconsistent rules established later on how things do and don’t work but nothing as to why. There is a throwaway line later about how Devlin rode back into town and killed everyone, which I guess explains how the town is full of ghosts, but since it doesn’t say that he and his men also died why are they here? Also why are they trapped there until Devlin is destroyed, he’s not established to be into voodoo or black magic or anything. They really did just slap a ‘somehow’ on the end of a description of what’s going on and call it an explanation.

              It’s at this point that Langley gets the woman and the blacksmith who’ve been helping him killed. He asks about the rider who shot up his car, but she doesn’t want to say his name because he’ll magically hear it due to ghosts. He promises to protect her, so she says it and it reverberates all over a montage of the town. Somewhere in there she also gives him the sheriff’s gun from back in 1870. Later Devlin will kill both of these people while Langley isn’t there specifically because she said his name, so one more reason to dislike this idiot.

              Langley wanders down the street and the two outlaw cowboy ghosts he killed are there, good as new. Because they’re ghosts. He runs into the saloon where the helpful owner, a woman named Grace, explains that Devlin kidnapped Kate because she looks like a singer from their time. This doesn’t matter to the plot, by the way. Langley also gives Grace his gun so she can dramatically give it back to him a few scenes later. Then Devlin stomps downstairs and our hero and our villain have their first conversation at 52 minutes into the movie. He confronts Devlin, who challenges him to a showdown outside. They have a little shooting contest which Langley wins but which is pointless because ghosts. He and Devlin trade shots until a near-miss makes Langley drop his gun. He gets captured and Devlin’s about to kill him when The Dealer causes a distraction. As he’s fleeing Langley runs into the bartender again who helpfully tells him that modern guns can’t hurt ghosts, only ones from the time when they were alive, which is lucky since she’s right there to give him that old gun back. Which, aside, was very stupid for her to take in the first place. She knows he’s a lawman from outside the town, she’s going to hope he kills Devlin, why did she take the gun away from him at all? Nothing he’s done since would have impressed her into changing her mind about him. Langley manages to kill one of the pursuing outlaw cowboys, which freaks the rest of them right out. They start complaining to Devlin how the guy is DEAD dead.

              So this is when the movie rips off ‘A Fistful of Dollars.’ He crawls through the town under the buildings, then sneaks into the hotel and back out with Kate in tow. They grab a bunch of stuff he’s going to turn into bullets then hide in the nearby church. As they’re busy mixing gunpowder and making shell casings without molds somehow Devlin is going around and killing everyone who helped them.

              This is as good a time as any to dig into this movie’s view of how these ghosts work. They seem to inhabit some kind of pocket dimension that’s separated by something like a permeable reality membrane. People and ghosts can go back and force pretty much at will, it seems. One character even mentions that others have wandered into town before. While outside their realm the ghosts are invisible, while inside they seem to be flesh and blood, both of which is very lucky for the effects department. There are inhabitants of the town who go about their day-to-day lives while fully aware they’re ghosts, which makes me wonder why they still bother pitching up to the saloon to have poker games. Maybe they’re that bored, who knows. There is also a crowd of people standing around the edge of town, mostly obscured by haze. I think these are who the woman is referring to when she mentions those “caught between heaven and hell.” Also, remember above when I said Devlin was going around killing everyone who had helped Langley? Yeah, apparently ghosts can get killed in this movie, and I’m guessing they lose their personalities and get absorbed in that crowd of people? I guess? I suppose I’m fine with Langley being able to kind of exorcise the dead because he’s alive and was empowered by the previous sheriff and has an olde-timey gun, that’s enough for me, but the ghosts can kill each other? Because they’ve been in there for over a hundred years and Devlin doesn’t seem the most stable guy to me, he would have killed every single other ghost in that town inside a week. It’d be one thing if they were doing the looping thing, like they’re forced to repeat the town’s last day over and over, but they’re just hanging out, still running forges and saloons, apparently.

Can't say I'm a fan.

              Eventually Devlin figures out they’re probably hiding in the only other building that they haven’t searched yet and marches over with his guys. He announces himself to the church and tells Langley to come out, which causes him and Kate to sneak out the back. The next several sequences involve these two sneaking around the town while the bad guys are busy yelling at the church. Eventually the bad guys go inside and the explosives Langley left behind go off. I can’t tell if this manages to ‘kill’ kill the ghosts, the movie’s sprinting toward the end at this point and doesn’t bother with details. Devlin eventually gives up on the church and walks back towards town yelling for the lawman to give himself up, which hasn’t exactly been a great strategy so far. Kate gets to contribute something by tossing over an explosive, which takes out everyone but Devlin himself. He says some stupid things and Langley kills him by throwing an old sheriff badge into his forehead. It’s stupid. Langley and Kate walk through the crowd of townspeople at the edge of town and out into the desert. The sun starts to rise and all of the buildings disappear, the end.

              I need to stress how much nothing they managed to include in this film. Every scene should have been cut down to about half its length. Walking shots happen not to establish geography but to kill time. There are pauses between lines of dialogue not to build tension but to kill time. Characters will monologue not to create a dramatic moment or underline a thematic point but to kill time. Less happened in this entire movie than in the first third of ‘The Changeling.’ And not a lot happened in that movie! But I have to admit that it does look professionally made. The thing about Empire Pictures is that there was a floor of quality below which they didn’t fall. They had extras, they had location filming, they kept boom mics from the top of the shots and crew reflections out of mirrors. This is not a good or a smart movie but it is also not infuriating. In terms of craft ‘Lady in White’ is miles ahead, but I would choose to rewatch this movie over that one every time. It is just barely good enough to be a real movie, which I believe has been the entire corporate strategy of Charles Band.

Lady in White (1988)

               “Offensive” is a strong word, especially when applied to a PG-13 movie, but here it’s apt. This movie made me very angry several times over the course of almost two hours. I cursed aloud at the screen at least twice. Which is going to take some explaining since it’s a perfectly competent movie. I don’t think it has any severe structural problems, the plot makes sense even if it’s not always clear in the way it conveys information, and after a second viewing I calmed down quite a bit. That first watch was a doozy, though, and one thing I got mad about genuinely is horrible even the second time through.

              We have another instance where the financing behind a movie is more interesting than its plot. The film was written and directed by Frank LaLoggia, who I’d never heard of either. He’d directed one movie previously, the 1981 film ‘Fear No Evil.’ The IMDB plot summary of that movie reads ‘High school student turns out to be personification of Lucifer. Two arch angels in human form (as women) take him on.’ That movie made $3 million off of a $1.5 million budget. They’d raised money from individual investors over the course of several years and while they’d originally wanted to do a comedy they decided that a horror movie would be more likely to make its money back. Again we find the wisdom of Sam Raimi. This (relative) success didn’t get LaLoggia’s foot in the door, as the financing for this next movie not only took several more years, they did it by selling penny stocks.

              To rip from the wiki: “The film was entirely financed through a penny stock offering, New Sky Communications, a public company set-up by LaLoggia and his cousin Charles M. LaLoggia, traded initially on NASDAQ for 10 cents a share. It was the first and only occasion that a single, feature film was financed in this manner.” The credited budget was $4.7 million and it made only $1.7 million in domestic receipts, but the Wiki is careful to note that the movie made its budget back before it even opened by selling the foreign rights to Samuel Goldwyn Productions and domestic distribution to New Century Vista. Still, $1.7 million is a pretty low box office return and it wasn’t until 1995 that he was able to direct again with ‘Mother,’ starring Diane Ladd and Olympia Dukakis, of all people.

              The cast has a couple of names in it. The movie focuses on a young boy named Frankie Scarletti, played by Lukas Haas. I’d do my usual thing of referring to how young he was in this movie, but he’d been a child actor for four years by that point. His father is played by Alex Rocco, who’s always going to be Moe Greene from ‘The Godfather’ to me. Len Cariou plays family friend Phil Terragrossa, who had a decent screen career but broke out on Broadway. He won a Tony as the original Sweeney Todd opposite Angela Lansbury. I guess I should mention Jason Presson as Frankie’s older brother Geno. He’s not good in this but he was one of the main three kids in ‘Explorers,’ that’s worth something.

              A lot of the problems I have with this movie are going to come down to tone. This is a movie about a serial child abuser with the sensibility of a Disney Channel original. It opens in what was then the present day with a grown-up version of our main character coming back to his hometown for the first time in a while. We don’t ever get a good look at his face because it’s the director playing the part to get out of the cost of another actor. For the first few minutes everything is ADR over the backs of people’s heads or footage of a cab driving along as the movie helpfully lays out that he’s now a famous horror author. He asks the driver to stop by a small cemetery on the way, and when he gets out of the taxi the driver follows him in. And then asks him who here’s there to see. Which is weird. We then flash back to the fall of 1962 for the rest of the movie and the narration begins.

              My stance on narration is well-established: I think most examples of it show an inability by either the director or the writer (in this case he’s both) to convey information in an organic way, either visually or through dialogue. With narration I’m always wondering in the back of my head if we have another ‘Blade Runner’ situation, where someone in the production was convinced that audiences were going to be lost if the film didn’t pre-digest the information and vomit it directly into their mouths. I tend to think the narration here was always meant to be included because there are several long, dialogue-free sequences with narration over the top that sure seem to have been shot with the expectation of voiceover. There’s even one piece of plot-relevant information that is only conveyed through this narration, so if that was added at the last second it was a pretty big screenwriting miss.

              On the other hand there is also a decent set of reasons to think it might have been added in post, not least of which being that there’s no scene at the end of the movie to complete the wrap around section. There are those few minutes at the beginning, narration over the course of the movie, and then it just ends. There’s also the fact that while the movie is set up as the flashback of our main character, several times he even directly comments on the visuals on screen, there are plenty of sequences in the movie that he wasn’t present for and would have no way of knowing about. There’s obvious stuff, like his father talking with members of the police, or a press conference on the steps of a courthouse after grand jury deliberations, or the not-Lady in White traipsing home alone through the woods at night. None of them are as mystifying as a single camera movement, though. About halfway through the movie Frankie meets up with this ghost girl he’s been seeing. She pulls an ornament from a Christmas tree while asking for his help, and he steps forward to take a look at it. The camera then switches to a view outside of the bay windows they’re standing in front of and slowly pulls back to reveal that Frankie isn’t talking to anyone!

              There are two reasons I’m confused by this. First we know she’s a ghost and that an outside observer would likely not see her, why is this being established yet again? Second this is supposed to be Frankie’s story that he’s telling a random cab driver, did he pause in the middle of talking about the ghost to pose a hypothetical scenario about what a witness would have seen? I’m not going to pitch a fuss about every time the movie shows us something that it technically shouldn’t but there’s no need to rub our noses in how much it’s breaking format.

              So on to the movie itself. One of the first notes I wrote is “it took me 10 minutes to hate this movie.” This is because the opening does a very good job of establishing the tone of the rest of the film, and that tone is sub-Spielberg made-for-tv movie. The 1962 as presented here is full-on “Leave it to Beaver” nonsense. We see happy butchers sweeping steps, kids on bikes ringing bells at each other, a paperboy riding away from a customer chasing him down the street for his paper, a sassy café waitress handing out scraps to dogs from the back of the kitchen, it lays it on thick. And the score is all strings and woodwinds and sounds like a bad episode of “The Brady Bunch.” I’m sure there’s a term for when the music follows along and punctuates the movements and actions on screen, like quiet little strings when a character is sneaking or a flute trill when they steal something. “Tom & Jerry” shit. It’s all over the movie and makes the murder and racism really pop out.

              Frankie Scarletti is a skinny kid who fancies himself a writer, so they’re also working the Stephen King territory hard. This comes up exactly three times in the movie and the first was during that opening section. He both is and isn’t a nerd, he’s bullied by a couple of the kids in class but he also punches one of them out. He has a very annoying older brother and a widower father who runs the local ironworks. One day after school, on Halloween no less, some bullies trick him into getting locked in the class cloakroom over the weekend. I will point out that in 1962 Halloween was on a Wednesday, but we’re moving on. It’s also established that the school was about to start work on the building’s heating, which is kind of plot relevant. Frankie eventually gives up on trying to break out and falls asleep, dreaming about his dead mother. I wrote all sorts of notes about the movie having a dream sequence inside of a flashback but it gets a lot sillier later on so now this seems almost quaint. Eventually he sticks himself atop a shelf in a back corner and admittedly the way this is shot makes for a striking image, which is why this was the cover for the home video release.  

              As the church clock tower strikes ten a little ghost girl wanders into the room through the locked door. It’s a terrible effect, by the way, just a semi-transparent layer laid over the top. It makes ‘The House Where Evil Dwells’ look … well, it doesn’t make it look good but it’s not any worse than this. She starts talking to somebody still outside the cloakroom and their conversation establishes a few things: she knows her killer, he’d bought her the dress she’s wearing, and he sings to himself so much that she’s learned his favorite tune, “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?” As she’s twirling around singing the song she sees Frankie and they stare at each other for a few moments, then she darts away. She tells whoever brought her there that she’s scared and wants to go home, then she gets murdered by the invisible killer. As she’s screaming for her mom somebody rips at her clothes and the camera follows a skittering sound from her to a nearby grate in the floor. It wasn’t until the second viewing that I understood this indicated that the killer had accidentally lost something down there. After the girl is dead he drops something else down the drain which I think is eventually revealed to be her barrette, though I still have no idea why he did that. The invisible killer picks up the body and carries it out through the still-closed door.

              As Frankie is busy processing this somebody who’s not a ghost breaks into the cloakroom. He’s an adult in dark clothes and a hood. The kid pushes himself further back into a corner and pulls a Dracula mask down over his face. The figure, dressed all in black, starts to pull up the grate and then Frankie makes a noise. The figure demands to know who Frankie is, and when he starts explaining he gets pulled down and strangled to death. His soul separates from his body and flies over the town. He gets a bunch of visions of people feeling sad about his death, then he’s at a soundstage mockup of a cemetery and the little ghost girl is there. She says her name is Melissa and that her mom is lost, then Frankie wakes back up because his father is there giving him mouth-to-mouth. Not sure any of this entirely works, but fine.

              Genuinely nothing much happens for half an hour. The police arrest the janitor since he was drunk in his office that night (and we will get back to this), Frankie slowly recovers, the ghost starts playing around with the stuff in his room at night, and we see an older woman with red hair staring through his window at night. Very little of this pays off. We’re also informed that Frankie nearly became the 12^th victim of a serial killer of children that’s been around for about a decade. Turns out Melissa was his first victim back in 1951. Near the hour mark it occurs to Frankie to follow up on that whole ‘almost being killed’ thing and thinks to go look in the grate. He pulls out a bunch of little trinkets as well as a plastic barrette and an old class ring.

              While visiting his dad at work he overhears the visiting police chief admit that they’re going to railroad the janitor and hang all eleven murders on him. He also confides in Frankie’s dad that the first victim was killed in the cloakroom, something kept from the papers but which we already knew. Family friend Phil then wanders by and Frankie unloads everything to him about the ghost he saw and in doing so realizes that since the class ring was the only thing down in the grate that wasn’t a kid’s then it must belong to the killer. Says all of this out loud to the guy. I will simply point out that Roger Ebert mentioned in his review of this very film his Law of Conservation of Characters, “Any main character whose purpose is not readily apparent must be more important than he or she seems.” Maybe keep an eye on Phil.

              For dumb reasons Frankie then loses the ring and his idiot brother Geno finds it. For the rest of the movie any investigation work about the owner of the ring is done by him and not Frankie. This does pay off in the climax so I’m begrudgingly allowing it. We get a scene where the bullies from earlier successfully peer-pressure Frankie into exploring the old, abandoned house on the cliff, which is when I cursed at the movie out loud for the first time. Minor shenanigans ensue and then all three are chased out of the house by that woman with red hair who was staring through Frankie’s window before.

              Here I have to be retroactively angry, because what the movie is doing is making you think this is the titular Lady in White, but eventually it’s revealed to be a mentally ill but alive woman. And that’s fine as far as it goes, classic misdirection, but the movies cheats since this non-ghost fucking floats down the stairs while her clothes flutter in the nonexistent wind. It’s one thing to imply that a person is a ghost in a ghost movie, it’s another entirely to simply lie about it.

              More nothing happens, then eventually Frankie and Geno see the little girl ghost in their bedroom and when she leaves at 10pm they realize she’s reenacting her murder again. And I will give the movie a little credit, this isn’t a stupid idea. Following a ghost who loops her own death to try to determine her killer isn’t a new idea but it’s a step up for this movie. I was annoyed during the first viewing when I wondered why the ghost was suddenly following Frankie around, but then I remembered that he’s been carrying that little barrette he dug out from the grate around with him and she’s attached to that. It even pays off at the end, so I guess that’s one point back to the movie. They follow up behind the ghost and catch up to her floating dead body as the killer carries it out of the school. Geno gets glass stuck in his shoeless foot like the idiot he is so it’s only Frankie who follows the ghost out to the cliff by that abandoned house from earlier. He watches as she wakes up when she’s about to be thrown from the cliff. She screams as she’s tossed down, which apparently extends her ghostly influence far enough that the ruined house is now back in pristine ghostly condition and a woman with blond hair and a flowing white dressing gown emerges, calling for her daughter. She sees Melissa’s lifeless body at the base of the cliff and throws herself down as well.

              The next day Geno is home sick from school and Frankie gets picked up after class by the family friend Phil to go practice archery. It was established earlier that this was something they did together as a hobby, and if you’re anticipating some arrow-based excitement in the climax it doesn’t pay off at all. I think the director just liked archery. While this is going on Geno fishes out an old yearbook and discovers that the initials on that old class ring belong to Phil! Immediate cut to Phil saying that he and Frankie need to have a talk, but they’ll shoot one last arrow first. As he’s coaching Frankie he leans in really close and the camera cuts in to show him whispering in the boy’s ear, almost nuzzling him. Pretty creepy. As they’re packing Phil starts to whistle “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?” which clues in Frankie. He has no poker face so Phil realizes he’s been spotted immediately.

              A chase ensues through the woods that ends up with both of them back at the house by the cliff. Phil is strangling Frankie to death (again) when someone conks him on the back of the head. Frankie wakes up in a bed surrounded by candles with the woman with red hair looming over him. There’s an exposition dump as she explains that she’s the actual ghost Lady in White’s sister and she’s been wandering the cliffs for years looking for her. So I guess it’s just a coincidence that there is in fact a ghost Lady in White and that her sister also likes wandering the cliffs in a pale nighty? Anyway soon Phil wakes up and strangles her to death directly in Frankie’s face. During the struggle he knocks down some candles and the house goes up in flames. While he’s trying to toss the boy off the cliff the for-reals Lady in White shows up and spooks him over the edge. Frankie had earlier returned the barrette to the house, so ghost Melissa emerges from the flames and she and her mom, happily reunited, spiral heavenward.

The effects are not flawless.

              Phil’s not quite done yet and tries to claw Frankie back over the cliff edge. This is when Geno leads their dad and the cops to the rescue. Soon enough Frankie’s pulled back to safety and Phil spurns his friend’s helping hand and flings himself to his death in shame. There’s a ten-second camera pullback to show everyone watching the burning house and boom, we are done, roll credits.

              There are holes in this mystery, but not an overwhelming amount. If he’d noticed that his class ring was missing, why did it take Phil almost eleven years to go looking for it? It’s stated that he was worried they’d find it while working on the school heating system, but that means that he knew a piece of evidence was down there and didn’t do anything about it for over a decade? If there was a child murderer running around connected to a small town I’m pretty sure all the local kids would know about it, they wouldn’t be finding out for the first time from a newspaper. Ghost Melissa was talking to the invisible killer later revealed to be Phil like they knew each other, says he bought the dress she’s wearing and that he sings that song often enough that she’s memorized it. At no point do they address this, and they easily could’ve. Maybe he’d been dating her mom, he’s been questioned at the time and dismissed as a suspect but the sheriff remembers there was always some doubt, so when Geno comes running with this silly ring accusation, he thinks there’s maybe something to it … it’s stupidly easy to work in, is my point. Overall, though, while they fell down a bit on the ghost side of things (I still say they cheated with the dead lady’s sister) the straight mystery side of it played generally fair. It just wasn’t a very interesting mystery.

              So why was I so angry? Because everything above is surrounded by the cheesiest, most anodyne faux aw-shucks shit and it does not do a single thing interesting with the contrast. Instead it just constantly grates. I didn’t even mention Frankie’s Italian grandparents who have silly sub-sitcom fits of boobery sprinkled in between all the child molestation. I counted eight different scenes featuring these two scattered over the two hours this movie runs containing such knee-slappers as: grandparents argue over smoking, grandmother says something in American English wrong, grandfather pretends to drown himself over being forbidden from smoking and ruins his favorite watch, that sort of thing. My favorite is a scene where Geno get a thermometer shoved up his ass the scene before a civil rights murder.

              Didn’t I mention the exactly five scenes where this movie turns an unflinching eye to the scourge of racism in the 1960’s? Hell, I’ll bump it up to six scenes because their father sees a few seconds of a tv news report on desegregation. Remember that janitor who was arrested for assaulting Frankie, the one they decided to pin the murders on? He was a Black guy named Willy Williams, and this is in a movie that drops the n-word less than 20 minutes in to remind you it’s 1962. He’s arrested at the 36-minute mark and he’s arraigned for the eleven murders at 42 minutes. Frankie’s dad is on the phone with his cop friend when it happens and is incredulous that people think he did it. For some reason I decided that the rest of the mystery was going to play out as a backdrop to the trial, Frankie’s family was going to learn some lessons, and we were going to get a very 1988 look at race relations. This did not happen. There is a scene at a church where a woman whose son was killed by the serial killer yells at Willy’s wife. There’s a scene where Frankie’s dad drives the wife and her family home and expresses sympathy. Then at 89 minutes Willy gets released since the grand jury refuses to indict him, which I call entire bullshit on. Eleven white kids dead and a Black guy gets arrested for it in 1962? That man is going to jail. The movie tries to distract us by having the woman who yelled in church walk up to Willy and shoot him in the head, but after this scene is over none of that is ever mentioned again, so I guess never mind. Somewhere in all of this is when I swore aloud at the screen for the second time.

              This movie was infuriating to me because it was this inedible combination of corny, saccharine, sub “Full House” buffoonery with sudden, almost random spikes of sexual violence and racism. They would have these clashing tones in the same scenes, pulling my brain one way and then another constantly. I don’t need a scene where a character gets a clue about a serial killer butting up against a family casually eating while their wacky grandfather falls down in the bathtub. I’ve also never seen such a clear example of how authors choose whose stories get to be told. The first time through I was genuinely confused for a good twenty minutes after seeing Willy’s arraignment because there wasn’t a scene following up on either him or his family. I couldn’t quite understand that the movie was going to bring this topic up and then absolutely refuse to address it any further. Then that story ends with him getting killed anyways for the audience to learn … presumably something? And here’s a fun fact: one of these scenes, Frankie’s dad driving his family home from church, wasn’t even in the theatrical version. It got added back in for the director’s cut.

              So no, I don’t think I’m going to recommend that anyone track down a copy of ‘Lady in White.’ I don’t know if it’s streaming anywhere and I don’t care. I would schedule a double feature of this and the 1974 ‘Ghost Story’ to see which I hated more but I’m not going to do that to myself.

The Wraith (1986)

               The ability to rapidly and widely spread information over the internet has had some inconsistent and unexpected effects over the past couple of decades. I don’t think it’s controversial to claim that it’s been a mixed bag. On the one hand we can instantly blast out news and weather alerts for affected communities, on the other hand disinformation merchants can piggyback on those same signals to gain influence by spreading lies. Another one of those unexpected effects is the way formerly academia-only terms have broken containment and escaped into the wilder culture where they run free and mutate into unrecognizable shapes through a society-wide game of telephone.

Wraith The

              Take the term ‘toxic masculinity,’ which originally referred to facets of traditional masculinity that were harmful to the adherents. The phrase was intended to highlight aspects of traditional male gender roles that were harmful to the men themselves. This included things like suppressing emotions, engaging in risky and self-destructive behavior, the expectation of heterosexuality, the kinds of things that certainly could hurt other people but are primary directed inward in a negative way. Once the phrase started spreading everyone flattened the nuance of the term, losing the fact that ‘toxic’ means a particular kind of masculinity and isn’t describing the concept itself and everyone started using it incorrectly as shorthand for saying that men are terrible. Which they are, but that’s not what the original phrase was pointing out.

              The same thing happened with the ideas behind ‘the death of the author’ and ‘separating art from the artist,’ different spins on the same basic point. I’m not going to break out Barthes or anything, I just want to point out that ‘death of the author’ refers to the idea that meaning can be found in works that wasn’t consciously put there by the people who made them, while ‘separating art from the artist’ examines whether moral failings by an artist necessarily impacts the morality of the art. What neither of those terms refers to is the ability to still read those dumb Harry Potter books even though its author is a raging transphobe. People now deploy these phrases as ‘get out of jail’ free cards for still giving money to assholes. Do you know how much I’d love to be able to watch ‘Payback’ again? It’s one of the most compulsively rewatchable movies I’ve ever seen, but every time I start watching the moment I see Mel Gibson’s face I’m just out.

              The fact that the internet has ruined these terms doesn’t ruin the original ideas, nestled back in their proper academic contexts they’re as useful as always. These concepts even impact how much research I do for these reviews and what kind. The reason I keep quoting Wikipedia and IMDB and not much else is because they’re the closest I can find to truly neutral sources of information. I skim the plot summary to make sure it fits the theme, then I watch the movie, then I do a little bit of research on production dates and budgets and type up my thoughts. What I don’t do is read other reviews or watch interviews with the cast or crew. I do take some context of the movie into consideration: who made it, when, under what circumstances, etc., but I don’t listen to commentary tracks and I don’t look up any in-depth analysis. A lot of the questions I pose in these things do have answers that are out there, I’m deliberately not looking them up to keep my reactions and thoughts as original as possible.

              Which makes it a bit of a shame that I stumbled upon a full interview with the director Mike Marvin posted 3/17/10 on dreadcentral.com. It’s a very good and informative interview and answers a lot of questions that I had about some of the sillier aspects of the movie, and I don’t know how I feel about that. I had all these spiraling thoughts about casting and plot points and a lot of them were cut short by the director simply explaining what happened. That kind of spoils my fun, it’s much more entertaining for me to spend 300 words spinning out about the structure of a flashback or a weird ADR line, it’s less fun to have the director explain that one of the actors scheduled that day came down with food poisoning so they awkwardly looped in some dialogue and moved the flashback to a different section because another scene got cut and it flowed better. Luckily for me I don’t think everything he said in the interview is necessarily true, so I’ll sprinkle what he claims happened in from time to time.

              ‘The Wraith’ is a 1986 movie about the ghost of a murdered teenager coming back to take revenge on the gang that killed him through the medium of car crashes. Except apparently it’s not, because here’s what the director had to say about that: “I always envisioned him as emerging out of a sort of secondary dimension or reality, but I never saw him coming back from the dead as a ghost. I always thought he was a dimensional crosser, so when he was killed in the first place, instead of him going into the abyss or into the darkness or the void, whatever you want to call it, he goes to a place where he is able to literally cross dimensions.” He keeps going on like that, even mentions that he had an idea for a sequel where the dead gang members also cross over dimensionally and start wreaking havoc, and while he has some legitimate complaints about how the movie was made a lot of the things he says make him sound like a complete dingbat and I must regretfully conclude that the producers were right to rein him in.

              The movie officially stars Charlie Sheen as Jake Kesey, though we’ll get back to that. 1986 was a pretty good year for the third-eldest Estevez child, in just twelve months he appeared in an episode of “Amazing Stories” and the movies ‘Lucas,’ ‘Wisdom,’ ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,’ and ‘Platoon.’ This was the year his career really started taking off. Opposite him is Sherilyn Fenn as Keri Johnson. She was still a few years away from “Twin Peaks” and her other big career highlight that year was a small part in the Josh Brolin vehicle ‘Thrashin.’’  The terrible bad guy in this movie, Packard Walsh, is played by Nick Cassavetes, son of John, who had a small part that year in the Tommy Lee Jones movie ‘Black Moon Rising’ which has been on my list forever, I really need to see that. Last and just barely least behind Packard is Sheriff Loomis, played by a pre-crazy Randy Quaid. If you ever wanted to see Randy Quaid try to play a hard ass and fail, this is your movie.

              The director Mike Marvin has an interesting origin story. He started out by making ski movies at Lake Tahoe, whatever that means, and through some connections became a ski consultant on some movie shoots. He worked on ‘Better Off Dead’ and ‘The Spy Who Loved Me,’ all of which eventually led to him directing the boner comedy ‘Hamburger: The Motion Picture’ earlier in 1986. It was not a success. He has some interesting things to say about the casting for ‘The Wraith.’ In addition to Sheen and Cassavetes there are two other nepo-babies in the cast. There’s Clint Howard, son of Rance, and there’s also Griffin O’Neal, son of Ryan. Marvin claims he wanted Johnny Depp for the O’Neal part but the producers refused. This is where I start to doubt Mr. Marvin, because while it’s true Depp had only really been in ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ by that point he was about to be in ‘Platoon’ along with Sheen and the part they were talking about is so minor that I’m never going to mention the character’s name. He also claims that Depp was staying with Sherilyn Fenn in her hotel room during the shoot as they were dating at the time, which sounds like one of those partially true stories that’s expanded over the years.

              According to the director the idea for the movie started when Kim LeMasters at Disney wanted to make some kind of movie with cars. Considering that person isn’t in the credits anywhere and this isn’t a Disney movie a bunch of stuff must have happened between then and production wrap. He also claims that the listed budget of $8 million was actually closer to $2.9 million, with rampant theft making up the difference. He doesn’t elaborate. He views it as more of a Western than a horror movie, and specifically brings up ‘High Plains Drifter’ and how it’s only slightly similar, rather than basically being the exact same premise.

I suspect that's not Mr. Sheen up there.

              The movie itself opens with an absurd scene that sets up the plot for the rest of the runtime. There’s a gang of criminals who specialize in cornering people on the back roads around Tucson, Arizona and threatening them into accepting car races for pink slips.  They’re led by the evil Packard Walsh, played by Cassavetes. They never give his age so I’m just going to assume it’s the same as the actor’s and he’s 27. They box in a couple in a sports car, they drag them both out of the car, threaten them with knives, and hold the woman hostage to force the guy to race. Of course the bad guy wins and once they take the car and tell the couple to take a hike Packard brags that it’s all “nice and legal.” Which in the world of this movie does turn out to be the case.

              This point needs to be continually stressed: the rules of this movie universe are only tangentially aligned with our own. The laws are different, the people are built different, and any overlap between this world and our own is completely coincidental. Despite widespread assaults, murder, car accidents, moving violations, and destruction of public property law enforcement is completely unable to act against a gang they’re fully aware of. There are massive explosions with multiple casualties and instead of taking the sole witness into custody Randy Quaid asks him a few questions then waves him on home. In this world a warrant isn’t something a judge issues allowing for the search and seizure of property involved in a crime, it’s a piece of paper that allows you to force some criminals to come down to the police station and hang out for a couple of hours when that’s necessary for the plot. It’s a dumb script, is my point.

              So after establishing the gang’s M.O. and sketching in the personalities of the people who are going to die over the next 70 minutes we cut to a shot of a road stretching towards the horizon, down which a lone figure on a motorcycle rides. It’s Charlie Sheen as Jake, and this static shot is one of his longer scenes in the movie. I went through the entire film and counted up every second the actor Charlie Sheen is visible on screen and it adds up to 1,007 seconds. Take away the opening and closing shots, where he just rides a motorcycle either towards or away from the camera, and it’s 921 seconds. That is 16.47% of the movie. The character has more screen time than that, but we haven’t gotten to that plot point yet.

              Jake rides his motorcycle into Tucson and the first person he meets is Fenn’s Keri. He asks for directions to a local dam and she is instantly into him, offering to hop on his bike to show him the way. Before they can head off Packard pulls up in his sports car and orders her to get in. She does and Jake takes off, but not before Packard fixates on him as his next victim for daring to talk to his girl. During the drive over to the local swimming hole Packard tells Keri that if he can’t have her, no one will, along with a lot of other threatening talk that she just shrugs off. This pattern will continue throughout the movie: Packard will directly threaten her, will beat up people in front of her, tightly grab onto the blade of a knife in front of her face and bleed onto her, but she never reacts like she’s intimidated or scared, just annoyed. No matter how many people die over the course of this movie nobody ever really reacts the way they’re supposed to. Packard will explicitly threaten Keri’s life, and two scenes later she’s making out with Jake in front of the burger shack. The sheriff gives up on chasing the killer car after Packard’s death because he figures the vigilante is done now, no point in chasing him. It’s not even for plot convenience, it’s like everyone’s memories get reset at the end of every scene.

              Jake is at the swimming hole as well, openly staring at Keri, when he meets Billy Hankins, a friend of Keri and her coworker at the local burger shack. He drops some exposition for both Jake and the audience, filling in the details on Packard and Keri and his dead brother Jamie, who used to date Keri. We also get a little flashback to that murder, where Jamie and Keri are having sex when the gang bursts into the room. It’s very unclear what Keri witnesses until it’s eventually revealed to be nothing somehow. They knock Keri out and beat Jamie up before slashing him to death. Jake has some knife scars on his back. Guess who Jake will turn out to be?

              The next day Billy offers to drive Keri home after work, but before they get out of the parking lot Packard shows up, all pissed off. He challenges Billy to a race which he turns down flat, but it looks like he’s not going to have a choice when suddenly a weird-looking black car pulls up alongside them and revs its engine, clearly gunning for a race. And it is a cool car, by the way, a Dodge M4S Turbo Interceptor, originally a pace car for professional races. They created a mold of the exterior for the cars they were going to blow up and used the real thing for closeups. Packard and the gang forget all about Billy and rush off to have a race. One of the other members (the part supposedly earmarked for Depp) insists it’s his turn so he’s the one to face off against this obvious demon slash ghost car. They race for a while, then the Interceptor pulls away as if the other car is standing still. The gang member loses sight of it, then when he’s rounding a corner it’s parked across the road directly in front of him. He smashes into it with a decent-sized explosion, then after he’s gone off the side of a cliff there’s a bright flash and the Interceptor is back, good as new.

              The rest of the movie is basically just this repeated several times until everyone involved in the murder is dead, at which point he gives the car to Billy and takes off to the horizon with Keri on the back of his motorcycle. Oh, they both realize he’s Jamie back from the dead by this point, but the movie’s over so we don’t have to follow up on any of that.

This movie may have been made in the 80's

              A word about the car chases, and how for the most part they’re not very good. There are some decent individual shots, and some of the shots where the camera is mounted on the hood of a car barreling down the road do a good job of conveying speed, but on the whole they’re not particularly impressive. It’s just two cars driving with one out front and then the other, sometimes they’re next to each other, sometimes they bump slightly, but they all end with the Interceptor pulling away and then causing a crash. This is partially because when they were shooting these scenes there was an accident and a camera operator named Bruce Ingram was killed and another crew member was disabled for life (I can’t find his name listed). What had been scheduled to be a three-week shoot for the racing scenes instead turned into eight days.

              There are some odd flourishes to the movie that speak to loftier ideals that had to be cut along with over half of the budget. The windows of the Interceptor are tinted black so we never see inside. A couple of times we see a figure emerge, or stand silhouetted against the horizon, and it’s a figure in black leathers with a black helmet. I didn’t count any of this as Charlie Sheen time because there’s no way he’s in that costume for those shots. He also has braces on his back and limbs, and sometimes after he’s killed a gang member one will disappear. Only sometimes, mind you. This is never addressed by the movie, and normally I’d spin out a weird justification for it but the director speaks to this in the interview: “As the Wraith settles the score with the members of Packard’s gang and knocks them off one by one, he begins to get stronger and stronger. Then one more piece of what is supposed to be holding him together artificially begins to disappear.” I will simply say that this does not come across in the finished film. The gang members who die don’t burn along with their cars, they’re completely unmarked except for having burnt-out eyes. Marvin says something in the interview about St. Elmo’s Fire (the phenomenon, not the movie) and spontaneous human combustion when he really just should’ve said he thought it was cool. He also goes on about an entire subplot with Randy Quaid’s character involving a prairie witch, whatever the hell that is. This is why I find myself in the unenviable position of siding with the producers.

              One brief mention of the soundtrack, because while it’s not very good or consistent it does have some names in it. It has songs by Ozzy Osborne, Mötley Crüe, Robert Palmer, Bonnie Tyler, Billy Idol, and some other acts that didn’t really make it out of the 80’s. Almost none of these are their good songs, but they tried. This was released the same year as ‘Top Gun,’ every movie needed a soundtrack back then.

              Normally I would puzzle over these odd digressions in the movie, things that didn’t need to be there but were included for seemingly no reason. Things like the braces, the odd plane graveyard we see at one point, the futuristic engine of the car, Jake’s instruction at the very end to Keri that she pack light because it’s a short trip to where they’re going, which I guess means he’s taking her to the afterlife, or another dimension, or something? Then I read the interview and realized it was a crazy writer-director flying off in random directions being brought to heel by the studio. You read about how he originally envisioned that Jake drove the Interceptor by putting his hands inside the dashboard and being transported to another dimension, or his claims that his movie directly inspired the ‘Fast and the Furious’ franchise, and everything becomes that little bit clearer. It’s almost a fun movie with enough weird angles and edges that it’s worth at least a watch.

The House Where Evil Dwells (1982)

               For anyone who wasn’t around at the time, there was a wave of anti-Japanese racism that washed across the United States in the early 80’s. There was even a term for it, “Japan bashing.” The emergence of Japan as a recovering economy in the 1970’s, coupled with a weak US manufacturing sector, lead to a sharp increase in Japanese imports and investment in domestic companies and industries. The oil crises of the 70’s helped spark a sharp increase in the popularity of smaller Japanese cars and a wave of consumer electronics like the Sony Walkman revolutionized media consumption and home appliances. To a certain kind of person this influx was seen as somehow threatening to American values. People burned Japanese cars in the streets, members of congress held a public destruction of Toshiba products, and anti-Japanese (and anti-Asian in general, these people couldn’t tell ethnicities apart) crime skyrocketed.

Almost but not quite Chinese Takeaway font.

              This shift in public sentiment was directly reflected in popular entertainment. As early as 1974’s ‘The Taking of Pelham 123’ there’s a set of Japanese officials portrayed as objects of derision and also of caution. Walter Matthau’s character makes fun of them to their faces during the opening scenes only for the men to reveal on their exit that they speak English just fine. Both Michael Crichton in Rising Sun and Tom Clancy in Debt of Honor found something sinister in Japanese business culture, seeking answers as to why their economy was seemingly outdoing our own. The looming economic might of Japan is the threat in the background of movies like ‘Back to the Future 2’ and ‘Robocop 3.’ The Cannon Group got itself a piece of the action and made an absolute killing with their series of evil ninja movies. While the ending of the Michael Keaton movie ‘Gung Ho’ indicates that eventually we’ll all get along the movie still treats all of its Japanese characters as vaguely strange “others,” even the characters we’re supposed to like. This all kind of evaporated in the 90’s as the US economy improved and Japan’s stagnated. I also think Japan was keenly aware of this sentiment and a lot of their cultural exports over the past few decades, from video games to anime and manga, have had a soft-power angle to them. It’s very much in their long-term interest to stay on America’s good side.

              ‘The House Where Evil Dwells’ arrived as the hysteria was really starting to ramp up, and its view on Japan is … I was going to write complicated, but there’s nothing complex about this movie. How about mixed. Of course there are no major Japanese characters in the film, the closest we get is Henri Mitowa as the character Zen Monk. That’s his credited name in the film so that’s what I’m going to call him. Mitowa was half-Japanese and spent some time in the internment camps during WWII before returning to Japan to reside in a monastery, so I mean good casting for that one role but it’s white people all the way down for the rest of the runtime. To be somewhat fair the movie only runs for 88 minutes and has to cram in a lot of explicit sex scenes, there’s really isn’t enough time for any more characters. The minor Japanese characters which do appear are portrayed just fine. Except for the evil ghosts, but I think that’s fair. There are a lot of establishing shots of Japan in 1982 and for the most part they’re not framed in a way that emphasizes the exoticism or the strangeness of it all, they’re mostly just normal street shots or travel montages. I’m familiar enough with Japanese customs to appreciate that it’s at least making an effort with the details, a character explains that you need to take off your shoes when entering a house and it’s not played for laughs, it’s just presented as the normal way things are done there. One of the leads spends a night at a hostess club and it’s pretty much the same way it’s depicted in the Japanese media I’ve seen. It gets close enough with its explanations of yokai and tengu and overall it’s respectful to the culture. It’s still a bunch of white people having an adventure in a foreign land but at least it doesn’t insult the hosts while it’s there.

              This restraint is likely because it was an American-Japanese co-production. There’s not a lot of documentation on the production, but the exteriors were all clearly shot on location in Japan while the interior sets seem to have been built there as well. According to the end credits some key members of the crew were American or British, including sound editing and script supervision, but most of the actual crew was staffed through Toei Studio’s Kyoto division. Being on the ground in the country and working directly with a local crew probably helped round off any rough edges.

              Direction was by Kevin Connor, who wasn’t quite a complete hack. His best-remembered films are probably 'Motel Hell’ and ‘The Land that Time Forgot.’ He also did a lot of tv movies near the end of his career. The screenplay was adapted by Robert Suhosky, who had previous written exactly one episode for a short lived 1977 tv series called ‘Code R.’ Everything online and the opening credits claim it’s based on the book of the same name by James Hardiman, and I don’t think I believe that. According to IMDB this Herbert person lived from 1919 to 2006 and that ‘He left England to travel the world as a merchant seaman in 1937. He was a survivor of a sea battle near Africa.’ I cannot locate proof of a book by that name or anything with that premise by an author of that name. I think the movie lied to us for marketing purposes and it’s such an obscure title that nobody has ever bothered to check.

              There are really only three characters that matter in the movie. Our two leads are Ted Fletcher as played by Edward Albert and Laura Fletcher as played by Susan George. Albert’s career started off with a bang by starring opposite Goldie Hawn in 1972’s ‘Butterflies Are Free,’ then by the 80’s was doing mostly B-movie work. George had also had a pretty decent run in the 70’s, co-starring in ‘Straw Dogs’ in 1971 and ‘Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry’ in 1974. That movie keeps coming up, I really need to see it. The third character is their friend Alex Curtis, played by Doug McClure. Most of what you need to know about his career is encapsulated in the fact that he’s one of the key inspirations for the character of Troy McClure in “The Simpsons.” These are not terrible actors but the script doesn’t really give them much to work with. Edward Albert in particular always looks annoyed, and I eventually decided that the mustache and hairstyle he’s sporting for the duration combined with his natural resting bitch face makes him look like he’s always about to burst into tears.

              The movie opens in 1840, near the end of the Edo period and thirteen years before US gunships hauled up alongside the island nation and very strongly suggested it get over its isolationist phase. We see a young man enter the home of a young woman who’s clearly into him. There’s a slow and by all appearances unnecessary seduction montage as the woman plies him with food, plays a song on a koto, and also hands him little porcelain figure of a woman fucking a demon. Amazingly enough this will later become a plot point. Eventually they’re done with formalities and start getting it on just as her husband comes home. In a rage he grabs a sword and kills them both before turning it on himself. The openings titles play over shots of the destroyed room and corpses, which certainly sets a mood. Spoilers, these are going to be our ghosts for the rest of the movie. I will point out that there’s nothing about this setup that requires the tragedy to take place in Japan, jealous husbands kill cheaters the world over, but if you’ve already decided to set your spooky movie there it works as well as any other method for generating ghosts.

              Cut to modern day and three members of a family arriving to spend some time in Japan. The family is made up of husband-and-wife Ted and Laura Fletcher and their 12-year-old daughter Amy. They’re met at the airport by their family friend Alex Curtis, an American diplomat. During a car ride it’s established that Ted’s a writer of some description and a fan of Japanese folklore. Over the course of the movie Ted takes a bunch of random photos of a summer festival and some pearl divers, goes to drinks with some Japanese magazine editors, and rapidly punches the same eight or nine keys in the center of a typewriter in at least two scenes so sure, writer. We never do find out what kind of story he’s working on. We also never find out how Laura or Amy feel about moving to Japan. We never really find out anything at all about Amy for that matter, she’s so superfluous to the story that I even forgot she existed several times during the course of this short, short movie.

              Because of Ted’s interest in Japanese culture Alex has secured them a traditional-style house out in the countryside. Guess what, it’s the murder house from the opening. They establish that the house has been updated to include electricity and modern appliances (even a Western-style toilet, which is never seen again so I don’t know what the point of showing us that was) and it does seem like a nice house, although the lack of air conditioning would make it a hard pass for me. The first sign of anything ‘supernatural’ is at the nineteen-minute mark when Laura gets spooked by a light that keeps turning itself off. She’s really freaked out about it and a number of scenes later brings it up again. Weird. Ted blows her off, which is incorrect because this is a ghost movie but you can see his point. A minute or two later, after they’ve gone to bed, Ted wakes up in the middle of the night to see all three ghosts just standing directly in front of him, clear as day.

              A brief word about the way they shoot the ghosts, because it’s more interesting than anything else in the movie. To steal from IMDB trivia this time: “The visual effects sequences featuring the Japanese ghosts were filmed utilizing an old German camera technique known as "Shauftausen" … you shoot the scene with one camera through a right-angled mirror. The ghost actors are on a black velvet background so you can control the density of their image as you shoot, ie you fade them in and fade them out and line them up easily with the 'live' actors.” This translates on screen to a better visual effect than William Castle’s Illusion-O, but not by much, the two layers of actors are obviously shot separately from each other and syncing the two for specific effects like flipping a bowl or stabbing a sword into a table happens far too infrequently.

              So after Ted sees the ghosts there’s a pretty explicit sex scene that lasts for a full two minutes and twenty-five seconds. According to the director this was a specific ask from the producers. At least they listened to Susan George’s demands and she got to keep her panties on during filming.

              The premise of the movie is that the ghosts keep messing with the family, which doesn’t happen as often as you’d think. The three ghosts are portrayed as working together, they’re even shown as having little ghost confabs in the hallways, but for most of the movie it’s only the woman ghost, named Otami, who actually does anything. Before much in the way of shenanigans start Zen Monk (I’ve now decided that his name is a complete coincidence) shows up to deliver a warning and when Ted doesn’t listen lets him know he’ll be available later in the movie when he changes his mind. After that Laura finds the little demonic figurine in a crack in the floor and shows it to Ted. He recognizes it as a netsuke, a small ornament worn on kimonos as anchor points for attaching pouches or small boxes as traditional kimonos don’t have pockets. He notes that it’s pretty old and she decides to hang on to it. As soon as she does Otami possesses her and she starts to say some weird stuff about Alex, wondering why he never married and how she would’ve jumped on him. As soon as the ghost leaves her she’s aghast and apologetic about what she just said and her husband brushes it off.

              Stuff starts to very slowly happen. While he’s at a festival taking pictures Ted sees Otami and is clearly smitten with her, snapping a ton of photos. When he develops the pictures she’s not there, spoooky.  Some unknown amount of time later Laura gets a phone call from Alex inviting both her and her husband to an embassy function. While they’re chatting Otami possesses her again (or as it’s shown on screen her partially transparent form sits on top of Laura and then they fade her out) and she starts pointedly flirting with Alex. When the phone call ends and Otami leaves Laura’s clearly deeply confused and slightly panicked about it, and then the scene ends.

              Later they’re getting ready for the party and Laura grabs the netsuke with an odd expression on her face. As soon as they arrive Alex points Ted towards some magazine editors and offers to dance with Laura. They get about twenty seconds in before she tells him to take her outside, where they wander behind some trees and start fucking. One thing that struck me after watching the entire thing was how bad a friend Alex is. Laura’s possessed, what’s his excuse? And it wasn’t like it took a lot, about thirty seconds over the phone and the man is clearly down for it.

They're upset they can't peep on her affair anymore.

              The movie continues and something like a series of escalations occur. While Ted’s drunkenly dancing with a hostess at the bar with the magazine editors he briefly sees her as Otami before being escorted away. Laura gets sprayed with some water by a malfunctioning faucet and immediately brings it to Ted as evidence there’s something nefarious about the house. She’s right, of course, but this is hardly compelling evidence. Maybe she’s reflecting on her actions at the party and in a state of shock, unable to explain them, and she’s using this as an excuse to get out of the country. I dunno, the movie never tells us anything like that, it would’ve been some nice characterization. The two start bickering over money and his work habits, one of the male ghosts stabs a sword into the table next to Ted, that sort of thing.

              Eventually Ted wanders over to the temple and talks with Zen Monk again. The priest explains the story from the opening, how a bored samurai’s wife seduced one of his students and it went pretty badly. Then the movie flashes back to before the original flashback to show Otami stealing the netsuke from a local witch, which adds absolutely nothing to the story but thanks for the neat witch visuals, movie. Ted goes to take some photos of traditional pearl divers, which is cool, then falls into the water when he sees one of the divers as Otami. She starts pulling him down into the water, but then he’s rescued by the other divers. Meanwhile Laura calls Alex over for another raunchy sex scene.

              Later that night Laura learns that Ted’s in the hospital due to the near-drowning and tells a young Japanese woman who’s suddenly just there to watch Amy for as she rushes out of the house. Pretty sure we’ve never met this character before. Later that night a bunch of crabs crawl all over the two as they’re sleeping, then two giant crabs show up to chase Amy out of the house and up a tree. She falls and hurts herself, which means when Laura brings Ted home from the hospital they have to turn right around and go back.

              Now convinced the place is haunted they ship Amy back to America. Ted and Laura have a fight about leaving and he smashes a tengu mask with a sword they have lying around, which sends her into convulsions. Ted runs off to talk to Zen Monk again while Laura calls up Alex and breaks things off. This pisses off the ghosts something fierce for unclear reasons. Zen Monk performs an exorcism and slaps a seal onto the outside of the house, firmly telling the both of them not to let anyone in or out of the house until the next morning. The moment he leaves Laura confesses about the affair. While Ted’s still processing this Alex shows up at the front door. There’s this goofy little moment where Ted strides over and dramatically flings open the door and the three ghosts quickly hustle back inside, heads down so they don’t cause a fuss. We don’t get to find out what Alex wanted because Ted instantly slugs him and they start to tussle. Under the ghosts’ influence the fight escalates to swords and eventually they recreate the deaths from the beginning of the film: Ted beheads Alex, kills Laura, and then himself. The ghosts pick themselves up from inside the dead bodies and hustle back out of the house. The end credits are over a recreated shot from the opening titles, only this time with different bodies in the background.

              So what was the point of all of that? The plot summary on the wiki states that ‘the ghosts are plotting to re-enact the mass murder-suicide so their souls could be free from the confines of the house.’ I have to emphasize that at no point in the movie is this information conveyed to either the characters or the audience. I could certainly buy that explanation, it would explain most of their actions over the course of the movie, except for a couple of minor things, such as: how does Otami appear to Ted multiple times outside of the house, and why? Why does she try to drown him if she needs him for the eventual murder-suicide? Maybe they attack Amy to get her out of the house, but why turn into crabs? Why mess with lights and faucets and swords when you’re not trying to get these people out of the house? Why fuck with them at all? Out of everything they do the only things that seem goal-oriented involve getting Laura to sleep with Alex. That’s really all they need, why the rest of that nonsense?

              This movie is not scary, not sexy, and not particularly interesting. The characters are flat and boring and despite their clear access to Japan they simply don’t take advantage of the opportnity to feature authentic locations. You can’t go to one Noh play or have one sushi lunch? I’m not even sure any characters other than Ted travel to a real location. But it does have ghosts and they do ghostly things, I have to give the movie that. The movie is currently available in a blu-ray double feature with the 1986 movie ‘Ghost Warrior,’ aka ‘Swordkill,’ a Charles Band movie about a samurai unfrozen from a block of ice after 400 years who has to battle his way to freedom. That sounds like a much more enjoyable movie than this thing.