26th October 2018 | 31 Days of “Alternative” Horror: High Spirits
It’s time for another film that is well placed to break up the tension.
This is something of a lost comedy that always sits on the back-burner, hidden behind family Halloween movies such as Addams Family, Addams family Values, various Scooby Doo incarnations, Casper and even Frighteners with Michael J. Fox has often gotten a higher showing profile on the regular televised schedule. Now that we get our entertainment away from scheduled television, High Spirits is one of those “shot glass in the dark” lucky pick but I am here to let people know that it is well worth sticking around.
There is plenty to talk about and so little time, and I want nobody to be mistaking that I am serious… dead serious. You need to see this movie. It is a stone cold farce.
Peter O’Toole plays Peter Plunkett, the eccentric owner of an Irish castle he has turned into a hotel. In order to capitalize on the tourism trade, he comes up with the idea to falsely turn the castle into “the most haunted Castle in Europe” with cleverly devised ghostly setups throughout. Naturally, he can’t achieve this notoriety in the tourist trade overnight: he needs guests who can get the word out. Among the guests are Jack, Steve Guttenberg and Sharon, Beverly D’Angelo, who become one of the first to realise that the native residents of the castle have a problem with the whole tourist trap idea. They are after all real ghosts who’s residual pattern of haunting is interrupted by wirework, electronics, and spirit recordings, and the last thing a ghost likes in their haunt is change.
Mary Plunkett Brogan played by Daryl Hannah and husband and murderer, Martin Brogan played by Liam Neeson are dead, but like a record on loop, the tragedy they lived and died through plays through time, again and again. The ghostly loop experiences a pattern interrupt — in true Anthony Robbins style — when Jack and Sharon get in the way of their haunted path, and simultaneously becomes romantically involved with their dead counterpart’s other halves.
Peter O’Toole steals the show, and you could say that even though he appears to have come unhinged, he is the glue that allows such a film to appear in a list like this. His character is humorously suicidal and a wretched drunk, but he carries on in the only way Peter O’Toole cares to carry on: with tremendous gusto, and fully throated determination to chew the masonry out of the walls while the rest of the cast watch, and wait for their cues.
This movie was critically panned, but carried a lot of hope during its shoot. Director Neil Jordon was kept away from the editing process and had no control over the final cut. He believes he still has his own version and that version is the one that he envisioned, so we can hope that one day, hopefully soon, he will either wish to, or be allowed to give us the High Spirited horror comedy that he wanted us to see in the first place.
You should watch this, not for the dialogue, the physical comedy or the secondary story-lines, but for the very fact that this was a movie made in 1988 with special effects that demanded a lot from the actors who did their best to make it all look believable. Even though Daryl Hannah was nominated — but didn’t win — a Razzie for her role, she stands out strikingly different and plays her character the way that only Daryl Hannah could. Nobody else would have suited the role. She has the skill to transform. You can tell that no matter the role, she takes her work deadly, deadly seriously.
Written by: Stephen Radford
website: stephenradford.com
Next: 27th October: Tourist Trap
