HIGH SPIRITS
A film review by Jeff Meyer
Copyright 1988 Jeff Meyer
Short-take of my reaction to HIGH SPIRITS: Staggering out from the theater in exaggerated Peter O'Toole shambling walk, opening eyes in terror and going "OH MY *GOD*!" in the best O'Toole-ian tones. Talk about wretched refuse.
The story of this film (about a castle run by O'Toole which is about to be moved to the United States unless O'Toole can turn it into a successful "haunted" hotel) splits down the middle, the first half being O'Toole and Irish cronies trying to convince the tourists that the house is haunted with *very* *bad* slapstick. The second half is where one of the tourists, Steve Guttenberg (surprise, surprise), discovers a real ghost (Darryl Hannah) and promptly falls in love with her. The script at this point makes no sense whatsoever, pulling scenes from previous ghost films as some type of precedent for what happens here. It's awful, and I mean AWFUL -- my review of SCROOGED is going to be bad, but I laughed at that. There wasn't one single solitary laugh in HIGH SPIRITS, not *one*. A complete waste of my money.
Not to mention a waste of talent, as three very talented (at least, in previous films) people worked on this:
1) O'Toole, who has done crap before (anyone remember SUPERGIRL?), but whose performances of genius (THE STUNT MAN, THE LION IN WINTER) excuse him -- at least until he does a PORKY'S sequel. This is close to the limit, though.
2) Beverly D'Angelo. C'mon, she can get better than this. Can't she?
3) Neil Jordan, the director/writer. OK, reality check: have I read the credits to HIGH SPIRITS incorrectly? Neil Jordan is the director/co-writer of the brilliant MONA LISA a few years ago. What happened since then? Complete mental collapse? HIGH SPIRITS gives one the feeling that he gave up by the time shooting began.
PS) Not under the heading of "waste of talent," but have you wondered if Steve Guttenberg ever says "No" to any part he's offered? Or is he just listed by Actor's Equity as "generic amiable dolt"?
My recommendation: STAY. AWAY.
Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer
INTERNET: moriarty@tc.fluke.COM
Manual UUCP: {uw-beaver, sun, microsoft}!fluke!moriarty
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews