Ghost Story (1981) This film's screenwriter, Lawrence D. Cohen, always had my deep sympathy for taking on a true mission impossible........trying to shape author Peter Straub's epic length novel into a coherent script for a feature length film.
While Stephen King, Straub's rival (and eventual co-collaborator) stuck to simple, primal easy to digest frightmares, Straub's overlength, overwritten novels often wandered off in multiple directions, overloaded with characters and incidents. Cohen, who penned the swift, simple screenplay for the first King blockbuster, the swift, simple "Carrie" now faced a doorstop book that leisurely spanned decades
So he was destined to take withering heat from the book's readers and critics for vastly condensing "Ghost Story", in which the spectre of a once beautiful young woman reeks literal heart-stopping horror upon four elderly New Englanders......and their younger offspring.
I've no doubt that sooner or later, Netflix, Amazon Prime or Apple Plus will take another crack at the book, only this time converting it into a 10 hour episodic mini-series, probably the best format for it.
But I'll now defend the 1981 film version, directed by John Irvin and photographed by the legendary cinematographer Jack Cardiff. For all the well cataloged deficiencies in its adaptation, the movie still whips up a fair amount of creepy atmosphere, fine performances and more than enough jump-out-of-you-skin scares.
Let's start of course with the to-die-for cast playing the aging members of "The Chowder Society", prestigious Vermont seniors who entertain each other with ghost stories......John Houseman, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Fred Astaire. The most frightening of their stories belongs to the men themselves - their fateful encounter, as young men, with the mysterious, alluring Eva Galli (Alice Krige, superbly sexy and scary)
The terrified codgers face to possibility of Eva's return....in the incarnation of Alma Mobley (Krige again, naturally), who at any given moment, turns into a horrifying, rotting corpse.....courtesy of master make-up artist Dick Smith, who crafted Linda Blair's head-spinning tween in "The Exorcist.".
And to ramp up the creep factor even more, Alma's recruited two very alive minions in Gregory and Fenny Bate, a father-son pair of insane asylum escapees. Yikes.
There's even more stuff to admire here......genius matte artist Albert Whitlock's creation of Eva Galli's crumbling haunted house, Phillipe Sarde's ominous, mournful score and among the cast, Patricia Neal and Jacqueline Brookes as Astaire and Douglas's anxious, long suffering wives.
Yes, I'll freely admit that this is the farthest thing from a faithful adaptation of the massive Straub book......and maybe it doesn't qualify as one of the most successfully rendered ghost movies, such as "The Haunting", "The Uninvited" and "The Innocents".
For all its many Halloween-ish pleasure, though, "Ghost Story" remains a classy little item and well worth adding to any October horror film watchlist. 3 & 1/2 stars (***1/2)
Just ask the snowplow driver of this movie's quaint little town..............and stay off those icy roads when Alma's at large.......
No comments:
Post a Comment