The only notable thing about Joseph H. Lewis' Invisible Ghost is its wonderful set-up: a heart-broken man goes into homicidal somnambulist sprees whenever he sees the ghost of his beloved wife. The twist is that his wife isn't actually dead; she was merely brain-damaged in an accident and now lives in his basement (without his knowledge, of course), being secretly cared for by one of her husband's servants. Every now and then she manages to escape and wander off. And each time she does, her husband commits another murder...of course, there is no real explanation for why he becomes hypnotized by her image. But when has a massive plot hole stopped a D-grade horror film from getting made? The pity is that I think that a competent director could make a decent film from this plot. Maybe Hitchcock or De Palma? Or perhaps Buñuel or Jodorowsky? Regardless, Lewis was none of these. In time he would become a damn fine director in his own right, directing two of the seminal works of the film noir genre: Gun Crazy (1950) and The Big Combo (1955). And there are aspirations towards art in Invisible Ghost: a clever camera set-up here, a tragic close-up on Bela Lugosi there. But it's not enough to pull Invisible Ghost out of the gutter.
3/10
No comments:
Post a Comment