Shanks (1974)

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

The film opens with a bizarre sequence where Marceau's character is performing a puppet show for a small audience of children. There are certain avant-garde editing techniques used which set the mood for the film and are reminiscent of the intro sequence to The Night Walker. Castle decides to employ intertitle cards, however, they function as a self-reflexive prompt for the audience in lieu of a surrogate for vocal expressions by the lead character (a mute character throughout the film although Marceau plays a second role with spoken lines). The directing has little finesse in its execution. The shot-reverse-shot seeks to suture but is too clumsy and overt - there is no alternating use of sound. Staging/blocking uses frontality as dominant and much of the interesting mise-en-scene is wasted for observation when redundant and sterile cut-ins continuously disrupt the mood while providing no extra insight to character psychology. The two roles played by Marceau are quite genius and provide great uplift for an otherwise pedestrian production effort. The two roles play into Castle's own authorial voice quite well and it is very surprising that he didn't direct this film better (keep in mind that it was his last). The two roles played by Marceau and the theme of the film itself concern concepts of interiority, exteriority, surrogacy and symbiosis (it is my thesis that Castle's gimmicks operated along these lines as well). There are some other provocative ideas at play within this script and its presentation by Castle (for the Freud and Lacan enthusiasts). There is a critical commentary about the corruption of sexual desire and the animation, re-animation and death of sexual drives in young and old bodies. There are criminological science ideas at play (issues of mens rea, Manson, culpability, etc.) rendering the film text richer and more relevant to its genre. Castle adds in some more self-reflexive touches that play well, including his bit role as shop owner, a horror film playing on a TV set, and a well shot and choreographed rooster attack which borrows significance from Strait-Jacket. The narrative frame keeps the fiction fenced in and frankly given Castle's oeuvre he could discard it pretty quickly in favor of a more open and interactive ending. The film is interesting and moderately entertaining but gets too cute pretending to be a fly caught in a spider's web when it should have been stampeding as an elephant until running into a frightened mouse.

Malcolm Shanks is a deaf/mute street puppeteer who's enlisted by a aged scientist to assist in experiments to reanimate dead animals. When the mad scientist abruptly dies, Shanks carries out his work, using the dead doctor's own body... and before long, more bodies begin stacking up.Love it or hate it, "Shanks" is one of those films that leaves an indelible impression on everyone who's seen it. Sadly, that seems to be very few. This is not a mainstream movie by ANY stretch, but it certainly deserves to be better known than it is. I first caught the film on TV decades ago and, while I didn't clearly remember the specifics of the plot (of which there's very little) until I caught it on TV again last night, I vividly remembered the corpses skulking about the screen. There's something intensely and appropriately creepy about the actors' performances as the dead bodies.Although "Shanks" is artier than the usual William Castle fare, there's traces of the director all over the movie, from the camera-work to the humor to the makeup (the dead doctor looks uncannily like the blind woman from "House on Haunted Hill") to the hallucinatory sequence to the gimmicky silent-film cards (there's very little dialogue) to the director's cameo. Unfortunately, like most William Castle films, it loses steam as it nears its conclusion. The climax features a group of bikers who appear out of nowhere to threaten the titular hero. I love a bad biker flick, but it was an element that felt wholly out of place in this film. Further marring the movie, the final minute or two felt like an insult to the previous 90 minutes of surreal grotesqueness.Still, despite the shortcomings of the finale, the performers are incredible to watch, the production design is beautiful, the use of sound and music is superb and it's nice to see Castle was still making unique films right up to the end of his career. If only Paramount would give this never-available curio a widescreen DVD release, I'd be a happy camper.

When one thinks of Marcel Marceau they think of the world's most famous mime. A performer who has entertained millions of people throughout the years with his mastery of pantomime. You certainly don't think of him as a manipulator of dead bodies!! But that's what he is here in this very strange film. He plays Malcolm Shanks, a mime who loves to entertain the neighborhood children. He lives with his sister & brother-in-law who are a shrew & a drunk & abuse him constantly. He is hired by a scientist who has perfected the art of reanimating the dead. I must stop for a second and let anyone who is reading this know that the film, while it sounds intriguing, doesn't play out the way you would think. It is at heart a fairy tale. A morality story perhaps. But most definitely NOT a horror story. To continue, The scientist dies & having learned his secrets while working with him, Malcolm reanimates his corpse & becomes very proficient at it. I'm not gonna get any deeper into it at this point. Suffice it to say that more than a few people get their corpses reanimated by Malcolm and no good can come from that.....Marceau plays both Malcolm & The Scientist(Walker) & performs admirably in both roles. There is a scene where Malcolm learns to animate Walker's facial muscles that is very effective. He goes from slack-jawed to smiling so slowly & eerily that at first you think the film is frozen. Almost like time lapse photography. It really shows off Marceau's expertise. There is very little dialogue in the film. It plays like a silent film(It even has title cards)because it is 90% silent. The score by Alex North is therefore very important to the tone of the film, & it is very effective in conveying the mood that the filmmakers were trying to achieve. It was so effective it was nominated for an academy award.I enjoyed the film but there are VERY SLOW PASSAGES in it. So slow that it will turn many people off. It also ends very curiously. It is a very odd but lyrical film that is a great attempt at a Grim fairy tale. But ultimately it fails because of it's terrible pacing & low budget. You might dig it if you're willing to accept it's idiosyncracies. If not...well give it a try anyway. Who knows??

Here is a film I had wanted to see for some time and finally tracked down a low-quality bootleg video of. I am quite a fan of unusual films like this, although unlike the works of David Lynch or Alejandro Jodorowsky, the weirdness of this film comes naturally from the storyline and not from any intentional strangeness just for the sake of strangeness. William Castle has created a neat, compact, self-contained movie universe here, with the setting being an odd juxtaposition between a dark Gothic castle and sunny Northern California. I couldn't help but be reminded of Tim Burton's "Edward Scissorhands", another modern fairy tale about a mad but gentle genius and his near-mute misfit assistant in a dark old castle surrounded by a sunny '50s style suburbia. In fact, call me crazy, but I will bet that Burton has seen this film before and was possibly inspired by it while making his own film. There are other similarities to that film: the genius dies leaving the misfit to fend for himself in the outside world, the villains are in a motorcycle gang, the misfit falls for a local blond teenage girl, and he also performs his "magic" for children in a school classroom. Also like the films of Burton, there is a mixture of visual motifs from the past and present, including silent-movie style story-cards, Alex North's heady music score, and a motorcycle gang. Sadly missing, though, is a highly compelling storyline, but in this case style over substance is not such a bad thing. This film is hard to classify, as it is not completely horror, modern fairy tale, or art film. I think it would be best to classify it as an experimental curio - one of those films like "Eraserhead", Jacques Tati's "Playtime", "Cabinet of Dr. Caligaryi", or "El Topo", which have no conventional film equivalent yet continue to garner a following from a small group of adventurous filmgoers. If you are attracted to films such as these, you will not be disappointed with "Shanks."