The Unquiet Grave

SHANKS Directed by WILLIAM CASTLE Screenplay by RANALD GRAHAM

In all the shellbursts of nostalgia for the 1950s, there ought to be at least one small report for William Castle, a producer and director of low-budget horror films. Castle fashioned a personality for himself—a sort of little-theater Hitchcock—and assaulted audiences with gimmicks that never really succeeded in disguising the abject sleaziness of his movies. In The House on Haunted Hill, he announced a new process called "Emerge," which turned out to be a phosphorescent skeleton strung on wires and sent scurrying over the heads of the audience. In The Tingler, Castle himself appeared at the beginning to warn audiences they would receive what turned out to be—quite literally—a shock. Selected seats were wired, and when the monster was unleashed in the film certain members of the audience got a mild jolt.

Castle abandoned these low jinks in the 1960s and even tried going straight, as the producer of Rosemary's Baby. Shanks, however, is a return to true form. It is awful. There are no technical stunts in the movie, but there is one rather flabby device: the hero, a puppeteer named Malcolm Shanks, is a mute. Since he is played by Marcel Marceau, he is also a mime and really requires no words. The plot, which is crusted with mold, involves a fantasy in which Shanks dreams of a spooky old house (not the one on Haunted Hill, however), a nice old mad scientist and his experiments in which the dead can be made mobile like puppets.

Hint of Eroticism. There is also a subplot involving Shanks' assistant (Cindy Eilbacker), a perky little number who is killed by some menacing motorcyclists. Shanks, though a timid fellow, manages to do in the villains and reactivate the girl. As she walks toward Shanks haltingly, like a marionette with lumbago, she holds her arms out to embrace him. The scene ends with the girl, who is about old enough to qualify for the junior-varsity cheerleading squad, half dancing with Shanks and half hugging him. There is an unmistakable hint of eroticism here, but Shanks' fantasy ends just before things might have got out of hand, albeit interestingly. This movie, after all, is rated PG.

Besides playing Shanks, Marceau appears as the old scientist and gets the chance to wear a great deal of makeup. Little else can be said of his first major screen appearance except that he is admirably limber. Castle is using him as a come-on for his movie, as if Marceau were a skeleton that glows or a hotwired seat. ∎J.C.