Shanks (1974) BQ visitors well know of my perpetual, eternal, never ending search for the strangest, most obscure, most bizarre movies I can unearth from the abyss of total obscurity.
Pay dirt! A gold strike! The mother lode of strange. Featuring the oddest creative pairing to ever work together on a movie.
Don't even ask me how such a project could exist......the feature film, leading role debut of internationally celebrated mime artist Marcel Marceau. And directed by......
William Castle? The carnival barker producer-director of Hollywood's cheesiest, silliest, most ludicrous gimmick-laded horror movies?
Seriously? Marcel Marceau teaming up with the impresario of "House On Haunted Hill", "13 Ghosts", "The Tingler", "Straight Jacket" and "Homicidal" ??
With a host of powerhouse talent behind the camera? Composer Alex North? Production designer Boris Levin?
Let the weirdness begin.......
Correctly announcing itself as "A Grim Fairy Tale", the film hoped to blend Marceau's astonishing physical creativity as a mime with Castle's peculiar, patented brand of horror - in other words, horror so over-the-top it bordered on comedic.
Structured and staged like a pathos-filled silent film, it presents Marceau as simple soul Malcolm Shanks, a gentle deaf mute abused by his cruel, obnoxious in-laws, the Bartons. (played by Marceau's fellow mime artists Phillipe Clay and Tsilla Chelton).
Shanks entertains a small town's children with his own hand made marionettes and mime routines, until he's given a job as assistant to an elderly, reclusive scientist Dr. Walker (also Marceau).
Teetering near death himself, the ancient Walker's devised a way of re-animating the dead......via remote controlled electrode pins stuck in a corpse's arms, legs and neck. After discovering the old man's passed away, Shanks manages to engineer the deaths of his tormentors, the hated Bartons.
Then with the implanted electrodes, Shanks turns their corpses into twitching, strutting life sized puppets, much to the horror and then fascination of Celia (Cindy Eilbacher) a young girl he's befriended.
Shanks throws a birthday banquet for Celia, comically served by the dead but ambulatory Bartons, until they're interrupted by an invading gang of Hell's Angels bikers. And all of the expected tragedy, death and re-animated corpses duly unfold.
Though I'd love nothing more than to report that all this macabre lunacy is as much fun to watch as it is to describe, that never happened. Even a gifted, visual stylist film director would have found this project a daunting challenge to bring off. Marceau wanted Roman Polanski, but settled for Castle, the producer of Polanski's huge hit 'Rosemary's Baby'.......
But William Castle a born huckster who excelled in outrageous pranks to push his low budget cheeseball horrors, was never anything more than a barely competent journeyman as a director. He sure as hell was no Roman Polanski. "Shanks", with its goulash of silent-movie sentimentality and perverse Halloween-ish sick jokes, was infinitely beyond this shlockmeister's filmmaking abilities.
While Marceau, and his two fellow mimes put on deft displays of body dexterity, all the walking dead scenes are interminably slow, stillborn and staged with zero imagination. It makes for long, long dull experience.......literally dead on arrival.
Which is exactly how "Shanks" arrived in the few theaters it played in......to no audiences and derision from critics. Castle never directed a film again and Marceau went to only a few brief cameo appearances, including his funny little bit in Mel Brooks' "Silent Movie".
I'd only recommend this to the most dedicated of film buffs and seekers of the most off-the-wall, forgotten films in the dustiest of cinema archives. For casual views, 1 star (*) at best.....
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