Back from the Dead (1957)

               Through no fault of this movie, I was already annoyed before I even started watching. I had two solid films locked and loaded, ready to go, and then it turned out that both of them had a complete lack of any actual ghosts. Despite their titles, 1958’s ‘The Haunted Strangler’ and 1959’s ‘House on Haunted Hill’ feature exactly zero hauntings between them. I was looking forward to them too, ‘The Haunted Strangler’ is a Boris Karloff vehicle good enough to be included in the Criterion box set “Monsters and Madmen,” and the other is a tight little thriller letting Vincent Price strut his stuff. I still have the 1999 remake of that one to come so I might shove in a little review of the original when I get to the newer one, which as I recall has some terrible CGI crammed in.

              Eventually I dug up 1957’s ‘Back from the Dead.’ I continue to be surprised at how few serious ghost movies were produced in the first few decades of the film industry. It started to pick up in the 1960’s for whatever reason and seemed to reach something of a frenzy by the late 90’s / early 2000’s (just in the years from 1999 to 2002 I currently have nine different movies picked out). Of course, the ‘found footage’ craze loves it some ghosts but I’m still trying to come up with some additional titles so I don’t have to fall back on ‘Insidious.’ I literally went on Wikipedia and just started looking at horror movies year by year until I found this one.

              The director was Charles Marquis Warren, who had a decent career as a producer and writer. He was primarily known for westerns, writing such titles as ‘Streets of Laredo’ and ‘Little Big Horn.’ He was also involved in the production of the tv shows ‘Rawhide’ and ‘Gunsmoke.’ 1957 was his busiest year, he directed five movies in twelve months. The screenplay was by Catherine Turney, adapting her own 1952 novel. She bounced back and forth between Hollywood and plays to some success. Much of her early work in the industry was uncredited, as seems to have been all too common, and this was her final screenplay.

              There are really only two actors in the film that I think are in any way interesting. The first is Peggie Castle, who here plays the lead role(s). The reason she’s notable to me is that she starred in two different MST3K movies, ‘Invasion, U.S.A.’ and ‘The Beginning of the End,’ the second one as the lead opposite Peter Graves, and those are still pretty foundational texts for me. She had a decent career and even landed a three-year stint as one of the main characters of the tv western “Lawman.” She’s pretty good in this movie in a dual role as a woman named Mandy who becomes possessed by a dead woman named Felicia, though the script doesn’t give her a lot to do besides vamp.

              Far more interesting is Marsha Hunt as Mandy’s sister, Kate. Although I didn’t really like this movie, I have to give it credit for actually doing what I keep asking these films to do, which is beef up a secondary woman’s role into the lead that the story structure naturally wants it to be. This movie has an ostensible male protagonist of sorts in Dick, Mandy’s husband, but he doesn’t have a whole lot do with the story and thus is offscreen a great deal of the time. Marsha Hunt had a fascinating life. Her career was plugging along just fine for the first few years, she didn’t have ingenue looks but what she did have was a good work ethic and natural acting talent. Then in 1950 she ran into the HUAC buzzsaw and got blacklisted. By 1957 the infamy had faded enough that she was able to star in six movies in three years before semi-retiring in 1960. After that she took the occasional tv and stage role but focused more on humanitarian efforts for the homeless and mentally ill of California. She only died two years ago. Seemed like a neat lady and she’s the best part of this movie by quite some distance.

              The plot is very straightforward, but to make up for that it’s constructed in the most obvious and boring way possible. Entire chunks of the backstory are kept shrouded in mystery for absolutely no reason except empty drama. About half of the eight or so characters in the movie are fully aware of what’s going on and aren’t sharing it with the audience or the leads for reasons ranging from “Now’s not the time,” to “Let me think more about it first.” About every twenty minutes we get an exposition dump about very specific parts of the backstory, just enough to lead us to the next set of scenes that eventually lead us to the next exposition dump, repeat until credits. The plot just kind of happens to the characters. I was 47 minutes into a 79-minute movie when I wrote in my notes in big letters, “Actual character action!” This is when Kate starts to do things besides exist in the backgrounds of scenes.

              The movie opens with dumb, faux-spooky narration over waves on a beach. A person eventually revealed to be Kate drones on about evil organizations and the harm they cause, and we see a couple of people in robes dump a body off of a cliff. I will give the movie some credit, this does come back up. Then we cut to Peggy Castle as Mandy standing on a big rock at the beach, staring at the waves, mildly concerned about the smug female voice laughing in her head and telling her stuff like there’s no escape, you’ll be mine, ha ha ha. Her husband and sister are also at the beach and they collect her soon enough. The husband’s name is Dick and except for feeling guilty for lying about his entire life before meeting Mandy he doesn’t have a whole lot to do in the movie. It’s also established that Mandy is newly pregnant.

              Mandy tells Kate about the voice in her head and how nobody believes her. Kate is properly sympathetic. Then they’re back at Dick and Mandy’s vacation house. Dick insists on playing a specific piece of music that Mandy hates (it’s later mentioned in passing that the spirit of Felicia made him do it). Mandy has a full seizure and passes out. Fade cut to the doctor telling Dick and Kate that she’s lost the baby. We are like ten minutes in and that’s a pretty big hammer to hit the audience with already. After the doctor leaves Mandy wakes up and claims to be someone named Felicia. She calls Dick ‘Dickens,’ Felicia’s pet name for him, and knows things she couldn’t possibly know. Dick stumbles out of the bedroom while the actor holds his face on a stiffly shocked expression, then he dumbly exposits to Kate that Felicia was his first wife who died six years ago. She supposedly fell from some nearby cliffs and, although her body was never found, her wedding ring later turned up inside a shark. It’s all as awkward as it sounds, like a dumb ‘Rebecca.’

              Everyone instantly agrees that, even though she’s acting completely differently and knows things she definitionally couldn’t, Mandy is just going through some kind of phase. The doctor advises them that the best thing for her is to do everything she asks and go along with this whole Felicia thing. I can already tell that physicians in these movies are going to be very mixed bags. I’m deliberately picking movies with real ghosts, so of course in the first half the doctors are all going to be useless, diagnosing patients as delusional, hysterical, etc. when there’s actual spookums afoot. I suspect that the ones who stick around into the second half are going to eventually turn into believers, because if they’re not going to be useful characters the scripts can just drop them from the proceedings, as this one swiftly does.

              If there’s anything entertaining about the next half hour, the stretch of the movie where everyone is walking on eggshells around this spooky possessed woman (until that 47-minute mark when Kate starts making her moves), it’s that Felicia arrives fully aware that she’s possessing Dick’s new wife and acts relatively reasonable about it. She understands that nobody around her believes she’s really Felicia, so she never pushes it that far. She pretty much ignores everyone but Dick, and if anyone claims not to believe her she just dismisses them. At first she has no idea who Kate is, but once it’s explained she acts fairly cold but not overtly hostile. At one point she even grudgingly admits that she supposes they might as well try to be friends. This detente doesn’t last long, but it sidesteps a lot of stupid shenanigans that could have happened.

              It’s also fun that Felicia is clearly a manipulative bitch. Turns out there’s a reason that Dick never mentioned his first wife, and that’s because she’s kinda evil. This trip is the first time Dick’s been back to the old vacation house since Felicia’s death and so people who knew Dick and Felicia back in the day keep turning up. They either have terrible things to say about her or they’re in the same evil cult she was so are a lot more cagy. We’ll get back to the cult in a second, but first I need to mention John, Dick’s old friend, played by Don Haggerty. He’s the only old friend who shows up that sticks around, mostly to romantically pursue Kate. I think some of these old horror movies consider it immoral if the survivors aren’t all paired up by the end. Haggerty was a prolific character actor, mostly playing thugs and police officers due to his sports and military background, and it’s weird to see him play Kate’s love interest here. He’s not bad, just oddly cast. He shows up to explain to her and the audience that Felicia ran with a bad crew back in the day and isn’t to be trusted.

It might be difficult to spot but Felcia's brassiere is showing!

              Eventually Felicia decides she wants to go see her parents. They all troupe over there and first they meet her mother. At the start she doesn’t believe Felicia has really possessed Mandy, then after getting some correct answers to a pop quiz switches right over to being a true believer. This doesn’t entirely make sense based on what we later find out, but it’s not that important. Felicia’s dad hobbles downstairs on a cane and when he’s informed of Felicia’s return he’s horrified, accusing his wife of causing the possession. All of which convinces Dick that his first wife really has come back and causes Kate to genuinely start to panic.

              Some incidental stuff happens next. There’s a dinner party that Felicia ruins by swanning about in some revealing lingerie. John flirts with Kate by telling her to drug herself that night (it doesn’t make a whole lot more sense in context). That night Felicia takes the opportunity presented by a drugged-up Kate to try to kill her by opening up a gas hose in her bedroom, which is pretty inefficient. I kept waiting for that side of the house to blow up. She then goes outside, grabs a big ol’ sickle, and murders Mandy’s dog. Kate manages to save herself from the gas after being roused by Mandy’s voice calling to her from … somewhere. And still none of this is enough for Dick to do anything about Felicia. It does finally kick Kate’s ass into some welcome self-actualizing, though.

              A neighbor named Nancy, someone who used to run with Felicia, drops by and mentions a guy named Renault. Kate finally notices that this is the fourth time he’s been mentioned and starts to ask some useful questions. A day or so later Nancy takes her to meet Renault, who professes to be surprised at Felicia’s return and mutters to himself that Felicia’s mother must have done it behind his back. Which is why it was odd that she was surprised at her daughter’s return before, but never mind. He tells Kate that he’s the only one who can help her, then as soon as she leaves takes out a picture of Felicia and strokes it as he croons how they’ll soon be together again. Nancy sees this and seethes in visible anger.

              Quick scene of Kate getting home, answering a phone, then immediately leaving. She goes to see Felicia’s father, who explains that almost everyone from Felecia’s past is in that cult, including his wife. He left some time ago and is totally a good guy now, so never mind what Renault said, he’s the one who’s going to help her. He doesn’t, and it’s never stated how he thought he was going to, but moving on. As Kate’s leaving Felicia’s mother threatens her, and as she arrives back at the vacation house she starts physically collapsing, apparently from some kind of curse. As she’s writhing around on a couch John randomly shows up. Just his presence is enough to drive the curse away, it seems, and after Kate explains a little bit of what’s going on he drops a massive expository confession. Turns out that six years ago Felicia tried to seduce him at a party. He turned her down and left, only to find that Felicia had hidden inside his car. He stopped along the cliffs and told her to get out, so she threated to kill herself. In the best line of the movie he admits he told her, “Go ahead, this is a great spot for it.” While threatening to jump she accidentally fell into the ocean and died. Turns out he just went home afterwards and didn’t tell anyone about it. This is never mentioned again after this scene and he faces no repercussions for any of it.

              The last fifteen minutes are the usual logistical scramble. Dick gets a call from Felicia’s parents’ maid that they’re both dead. They hurry over and while the dad sure is dead the mom is still dying, apparently from a curse from Renault for daring to summon Felicia without him. They go back home and lock Felicia in her room while the men run around, but she bonks Kate over the head and escapes. Dick and John come back from wherever they were and find Kate recovering. They all rush over to Renault’s house where they interrupt both he and Felicia performing a human sacrifice involving another minor character. Maybe the sacrifice was intended to make the possession permanent? At one point Felicia said she was tired, that’s about all the info we get on any of that. They struggle, then suddenly Nancy is there with a gun, all pissed off about Renault’s love for Felicia, and she forces him outside. Then Felicia has the sacrificial knife and everyone struggles with her until she has another seizure and passes out. There’s a gunshot outside, so John wanders out and finds that Nancy has straight up murdered Renault and is happy to turn herself in to the police.

              The movie ends with Mandy back in bed, fuzzy about what’s happened, and her last lines of dialogue are remembering that she lost her pregnancy (!) and saying that the past little while is like a dream. John and Kate step away and she ponderously intones, “She must never know the truth about what happened to her.” To which John ponderously replies, “Will anyone ever know?” Which yes, now that you mention it, a bunch of people know exactly what happened to her, including Nancy by the way, who is still alive and will have a trial for Renault’s murder during which Mandy will probably be called as a witness, and also during which any number of people will happily testify that for a few weeks she went around claiming to be Dick’s dead first wife Felicia and knowing all sorts of gossip about a cult from back in the day. Also Dick’s old in-laws both died at the same time, likely going to be an inquest on that. Also Mandy still doesn’t know about Dick’s first wife, someone should probably fix that, it’s going to come up again.

              The first and rather irreparable mistake the movie makes is never establishing Mandy as her own character. Peggie Castle plays Mandy for around a grand total of six minutes of screentime, and a lot of that is taken up with seizing, feeling woozy, waking up in bed, not really iconic shit. It’s never made clear what kind of person she is so when Felicia takes over we don’t have anything to compare that performance to. Dick and Kate are both weirded out, but Dick’s a douche we don’t like and Kate’s relationship to Mandy isn’t well-established either, she just hangs in the back of shots looking concerned for the first half of the movie and in the second half she’s running around solving problems and not interacting with Felicia all that much. The cult angle is really undercooked, we see six members total over the course of the movie and by the end they’re almost all dead (or re-dead, in the case of Felicia). We don’t get any specifics of motives or methods, they just wear robes and are evil.

              This is only technically a ghost movie, the word “spirit” is used a couple of times and a woman gets possessed by someone who’s dead. I figure that’s enough. The only special effect is a little bit of extra lighting when Peggie Castle first wakes up as Felicia, no double exposure or cheesecloth needed here. The movie kind of vanished after release, at the time being mostly booked as a double feature with ‘The Unknown Terror,’ also directed by Charles Marquis Warren. Wikipedia notes that contemporary reviews are “difficult to find.” It’s now available on Blu-Ray, which is nice, but it doesn’t seem to be streaming anywhere. Rips of various quality are online in all of the various places, but they all seem to be pan-and-scan VHS rips while the actual film is in 2.35 to 1, of all things. We’re now 2 for 2 on movies with easy access to cliffs to fall from and a plot spent figuring out dead people’s backstories, and while I’m sure the cliff thing is coincidental it’s only now occurring to me that if I’m going to complain about contemporary people investigating the mysterious deaths of people in the past I may well have picked the wrong subgenre to look into.