Redux Reviews :: A Case Study In the Sex Lives of Ghosts! Well, Sort Of, But Not Really in William Castle's The Spirit is Willing (1967)

Seems back in the year 1898, when Ebeneezer Twitchell (Donner) agreed to marry Felicity Pruitt (Daley), the ugly-duckling daughter of a shipping tycoon, he was really more interested in *ahem* ‘dropping his anchor’ with the Pruitt's lusty maid, Jenny Weems (Townsend). Catching them together at half mast -- if you know what I mean, and I think you do, an enraged Felicity took up a handy meat-cleaver and dispatched the both of them rather gruesomely. But while she moved the bodies into the cellar, turns out Ebeneezer Twitchell was still twitching, who took up another piece of cutlery and got his revenge, murdering his wife, too, before expiring.

Now, over the ensuing years since this brutal massacre occurred, several families have tried to move into the old Twitchell place; but every last one of them has vacated in less than a few days; the victims of eerie nocturnal visits and other strange incidents and accidents -- some of them fatal. (All recapped in a nifty animated opening credit sequence). Enter the Powell family: father Ben, mother Kate, and their teenage son, Steve (Caesar, Miles, Gordon), who unwittingly rented this haunted house for the summer for some much needed R ‘n’ R for the over-stressed Ben.

Unfortunately, the majority of Ben's stress comes from dealing with his recalcitrant son. And when the unruly and destructive spirits make themselves known and start trashing the place again and again, Steve is the only witness and, of course, being the only witness in a room that's been reduced to rubble, the boy winds up blamed for all the property damage, including not one, but two, of his Uncle George's (McGiver) prized yachts.

Eventually, with the help of some locals, including several of Jenny's descendants (-- all played by Townsend), the Powells come around to the fact their property is haunted by a nymphomaniac, a horny old fart, and his jealous wife. And to exorcise them out of their home and lives, they decide to give them all exactly what they want -- the perfect sex partner...

Memory can be a tricky thing; and the earlier the memory, the more it tends to play tricks on you by tweaking, embellishing, or being annoyingly selective when you try to massage that certain patch of neurons to paint a picture for your mind's eye.

As I've stated before, a lot of my earliest movie memories consist of being dumped off at the old Strand or Rivoli theaters in my old hometown for weekend blocks of films while the folks took a break from my rowdy brood. And one such fleeting memory was a film where a trio of love-triangle'd ghosts, victims of a self-inflicted meat-cleaver massacre, continue to haunt the site of their demise, much to the chagrin and distress of the current family living there.

But that's all I could really recall aside from a few bits and pieces about an ancestor who looked just like one of the haunting spirits -- in this case, one of those “nuts,” and therefore, often mistaken for being one of the ghosts. However, being the obsessive nut that I am, Yours Truly was determined to not only take those few scattered fragments and figure out what the film was, but then, hopefully, revisit it again -- because that on screen meat-cleaver massacre was so indelibly etched into my young and impressionable brain I just KNOW it went a long way in formatting my morbid taste in movies.

And with the advent of the internet, after some careful massaging, I had myself a title: The Spirit is Willing (1967); and lo and behold, it was the product of legendary schlockmeister, William Castle. (Of COURSE it's a William Castle flick; the axes in the back should have been a dead giveaway!) Alas, this discovery was bittersweet because further digging showed the film was never released on home video in any format. And after years of gray market searches proved fruitless, the film was once more tucked back into memory -- until we fast forward to about a decade ago when Sony Pictures announced it would be releasing a William Castle boxset, where my enthusiasm for this development was tempered only by the fact The Spirit is Willing would not be included.

And why would it? As all the films included were from the producer-director-promoter-huckster’s years at Columbia, and Castle had made the jump to Paramount by the time he made The Spirit is Willing. Fortunately, the internet came to my rescue once again as the film finally started popping up on YouTube, a broadcast TV rip, serialized in several sizeable chunks; and then, miracle of miracles, it also wound up streaming on Netflix in its original aspect ratio. And as of 2012, it was available as a MOD-DVD and a bare-bones release from Olive Films, which is currently shelved right next to that Castle boxset and a DVD of House on Haunted Hill (1958) in my basement, which Castle had done for Allied Artists.

"The First Picture to Face the Biggest Problem of Our Time: The Sex-Life of Ghosts," with "Kiss-Hungry Girl Ghosts Looking for a Lover in Haunted House of Mayhem" screamed the promotional materials for The Spirit is Willing -- a rare, latter day non-gimmick picture for Castle. And though the film sets itself up as a nice farce on the mating habits of ectoplasm it really doesn't do anything with this once the premise has been set up. And instead, basically chucks this notion for a more conventional take on the generational gap -- in this case, a chasm, between the Powells and their son.

Based on the Nathaniel Benchley novel, The Visitors, which was kookily illustrated by the King Kook himself, Charles Addams, the author also had a hand in another filmed farce with The Russians Are Coming, The Russians are Coming (1966), and perhaps the strangest made for TV movie ever produced with Sweet Hostage (1975), where an escaped mental patient kidnaps a girl, who then, while hiding out, eventually fall in love. Benchley’s father was Robert Benchley, a noted syndicated humorist and character actor -- The Major and the Minor (1942), Week-End at the Waldorf (1945). And Benchley’s own son, Peter Benchley, would carve out his own literary niche and movie history when he penned the novel, Jaws.

Circling back to The Visitors, when comparing the adapted film to the source novel, it looks like scriptwriter, Ben Starr, tossed most of the macabre plot for a series of repeating gags -- that repeat and repeat and repeat. And then repeat, and repeat and repeat some more. And though some of those repeating gags work (-- like Caesar and Miles being constantly interrupted while trying to make some whoopie), most have run out of gas by the third reel. 

Meantime, the ghostly effects are top-notch for the time of production, and the amiable cast is more than solid -- solid enough to almost make this mess work. I mean, Sid Caesar is always a treat, and Vera Miles shows some fine comedic chops. And John Astin makes a welcome fourth-quarter appearance as a goofy psychiatrist, Dr. Friedman, but even he can't salvage an ending where the film basically does just that: ends, without really resolving anything.

Yeah, as one watches The Spirit is Willing you easily get a sense Castle wasn’t really all that into it. The whole thing seems rushed, the script is a flatline, and the yuks barely perfunctory. To be fair, the man was also knee-deep in the tumultuous pre-production of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) at the time, too, and concurrently engaged in a Holy War with Paramount chief, Robert Evans, over the rights to Ira Levin’s novel -- of which Castle owned, and who wanted to direct the later picture but Evans ultimately wouldn’t let him and gave it to Roman Polanski instead.

And all of this is doubly sad because with a little more fine-tuning and pruning, they could have had something truly hilarious here with all the pieces present. As it is, these pieces just don’t fit together all that well, making The Spirit is Willing nothing but a bunch of people shouting at each other, some mixed-up identity buffoonery, and a copious amount of property damage set to a really kickin' Vic Mizzy score. And that’s about it.

My faulty memory also had the ghosts re-enacting the ghoulish massacre on a nightly basis, and one instance where Barry Gordon’s character got mixed up in the procession of blades, bodies, and revolving doors from the kitchen to the dining room, but it actually was shown just the once, at the very beginning -- but, dammit, that scene always stuck with me and stuck with me good. After that, we're strictly in 13 Ghosts (1960) without the gimmick territory, though it is implicitly implied young Steve and Jenny's ghost knocked-boots, which would’ve really opened up a can of worms if they were brave enough to take it just a step farther. Still, if you dig this kind of corniness, straight off the cob, like I do, and your flesh isn't weak, then The Spirit is Willing is worth at least one spin.

The Spirit is Willing (1967) William Castle Productions :: Paramount Pictures / P: William Castle / AP: Dona Holloway / D: William Castle / W: Ben Starr, Nathaniel Benchley (Novel) / C: Harold E. Stine / E: Edwin H. Bryant / M: Vic Mizzy / S: Sid Caesar, Vera Miles, Barry Gordon, Jill Townsend, John McGiver, John Astin, Robert Donner,

Recommendations :: Another Highly Digestible Two-Punch Combo from Arrow Video: Wayne Berwick's Microwave Massacre (1983) and John De Bello's Return of the Killer Tomatoes (1988)

Is it a horror film that thinks it’s a comedy? Or is it a comedy that thinks it’s a horror film? You be the judge as a hen-pecked husband’s already volatile home-life is suddenly made worse when his shrewish wife, May (Claire Ginsberg), purchases an industrial-size microwave oven for their suburban home; all in a terribly misguided effort to add a little gourmet-style class to their meals – now with only half the prep-time. And while Donald (Jackie Vernon) would be happy with just a bologna and beans, he is constantly presented with culinary nightmares that he stubbornly refuses to eat, which always results in a nasty argument, which ultimately results in Donald going over the edge and murdering his wife when one of these kerfuffles gets out of hand.

To hide the body, Donald chops it up into more manageable portions, wraps them in aluminum foil, and stores them in the freezer. From there, life seems to go a lot better for the liberated Donald, who unwittingly cooks up a chunk of his wife for a midnight snack but likes the taste of her so much, he quickly finishes her off (except for the head) and is soon on a comical killing spree to constantly replenish his stores and re-stock his fridge, which is compounded when all of Donald’s co-workers get addicted to sharing his sack-lunches and demand more of that scrumptious mystery meat.

Considering when it was made, people walking into Microwave Massacre (1983) expecting some kind of slasher movie will be way off the mark. And those out looking for a comedy, which this technically is, should be warned we aren’t exactly in the Zucker brothers territory either. No, this film is more akin to the blunt head-trauma comedy of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1978) in that it plays the genre conventions its aping straight but amps them up to ludicrous speed. Not all the gags work, but a surprising number do. My absolute favorite bit is how the bread used to gag Donald’s sister-in-law (Sarah Alt), who’s trussed up in the closet because he refuses to eat her, convinced she’d taste awful, keeps getting moldier and moldier each time we check back in on her. And it still makes me laugh that Frosty the Snowman (Vernon) later played a cannibalistic serial killer. Apparently, the producers wanted to get Rodney Dangerfield but he proved well out of their price range after Caddyshack (1980) hit big. It was no big loss as Vernon acquits himself quite admirably.

I remember trying to watch Microwave Massacre back in the 1980s during the halcyon days of VHS rentals, drawn to it in the horror aisle at the Video Kingdom by that magnificent Midnight Video box-art. Alas, the tape was so used and abused and filled with so many crinkles I feared for my VCRs life and gave up barley ten minutes in before the heads were totally fried. Our rental outlet had several other Midnight Videos but the only on that ever played worth a damn was The Wizard of Gore (1970). This was also around the same time my family got a microwave, a big old Amana Radar Range, which weighed a ton and hummed at sterilization levels whenever engaged; and I remember having to mark and remember the hot-spots to cook things properly or you'd wind up with something still frozen on one end and molten on the other, just patiently waiting for that depresurizing first bite.

Anyhoo, glad I finally caught up to it as there’s lots to enjoy if you take the film on its own demented terms and are properly prepared for a heaping helping of borscht and corn. It also helps that Arrow Video has once more put together one helluva package making it all go down smoother. The film is restored and looks great, perhaps too great, and maybe could’ve used a few nostalgic crinkles and vid-rolls. There’s a wonderful making-of feature, My Microwave Massacre, which gives an oral history on the making of the film by those involved, director Wayne Berwick, writer Craig Muckler, and actor Loren Schein, and topped off with a delightful commentary by Muckler moderated by Mike Trustino filled with all kinds of insights on the lengthy production and the several years journey to find a distributor. Recommended for those with stern constitutions, but not responsible for any indigestion the film may cause.

And speaking of those Killer Tomatoes, Arrow Video also has a pretty spiffy package for the sequel to that wonderfully gonzo goof of a film, Return of the Killer Tomatoes (1988). Set (and released) ten years after The Great Tomato War ended, the fruit that thinks it’s a vegetable has been outlawed in the United States ever since, which makes it hard for war hero, Wilbur Finletter (Steve Peace), to make a living running a pizza parlor. (He was that idiot with the deployed parachute.) Luckily, with the help of his nephew, Chad (Anthony Starke), and his bestest bud, Matt (George Clooney), they kit-bash together some non-tomato based pies to keep the business going. Meanwhile, a mad scientist named Dr. Gangreen (John Astin) is determined to start another tomato uprising. But unlike before, where music proved the revolution's downfall, Gangreen uses mood music to transform tomatoes into gun-toting human replicant commandos. (And they called him mad at the academy.*pfeh*)

Now, one of these more *ahem* curvy replicants gets tired of being bullied by her boss and defects to the other side, where she falls for Chad, who quickly gets to the truth behind Tara's (Karen Mistal) weird behavior and strange little pet – essentially a tomato Mogwai only it isn’t articulated at all, unless being tossed around is considered articulate. Anyways, Chad and Matt eventually uncover Gangreen’s scheme to break Jim Richardson (Rick Rockwell), the instigator of the first Tomato War, out of prison, and install him as president once he’s overthrown the country, which leaves it to Chad, Matt, Tara and Finletter, who gets the surviving members of his old crew back together, including master of disguise, Sam “Anybody Got Any Ketchup” Smith (Gary Smith), to once more oppose this dastardly onslaught of killer produce and splat them for good.

I freely admit I am a huge fan of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, a film I genuinely enjoy and find kind of ingenious on many levels. Return of the Killer Tomatoes is a ton of fun, with a great performance from Astin, and a lot of clever fourth-wall breaking, with some hilarious pot-shots at filmmaking and product placement, but it doesn’t quite reach the levels of absurdity as its predecessor, which is why it’s mostly and unjustly known as an early “embarrassing” role for Clooney, though he has nothing to be embarrassed about, here. Believe me he’s been in a lot worse than this. 

The Arrow disc includes a solid commentary with the man behind it all, John De Bello, and a lengthy interview with Anthony Starke, who recounts the production and how much fun the shoot was. There’s also a spiffily illustrated collector’s booklet by critic James Oliver. Again, a lot of fun to be had if your head is the right place. And if nothing else, it has got me itching to finally do a digital upgrade on the original and finally retire that old and worn out VHS tape.