William Castle's Shanks (1974)

[bigshot]

This is the one Castle film I had never been able to find on VHS or DVD, and apparently it came out a year or two on blu-ray and flew under my radar. I stumbled across it at Amazon and ordered it, and I'm really glad I did.

I'm a big fan of movies that hit the reset button on your brain. Trying to compare this to any other movie is very difficult. Probably the only film that even gets close to the same sort of territory is Who Slew Auntie Roo? This film actually kind of feels like a psycho biddy movie, but there's no Shelly Winters or Joan Crawfod.

The movie is played like a fairy tale and stars the pantomimist, Marcel Marceau playing a dual role as an old man and the young lead. The two supporting actors also seem to be adept at pantomime too. The film is almost a silent film, complete with title cards. It's full of weird artifice... puppetry, clowns, pantomime and zombies. Yes, reanimated corpses of the dead. Oh, and one more thing... a gang of violent bikers on the rampage.

The best thing about this film is the tone. It's like your demented cousin that your family warned you to stay away from... at one moment it's nice and friendly and charming, and then all of a sudden the ideas behind the action are really sick. Castle never goes for cheap shocks or blood n guts. But there's lot of creepy inappropriate behavior going on with a big grin. I have no idea what Castle was thinking when he paired the adult man with the little blonde girl in the wedding dress. Subtext abounds.

This isn't a great film, but it certainly is an unique one. The transfer is very good, and I'm told that the soundtrack contains cues that were originally written for Kubrick's 2001 but were replaced with classical music from Kubrick's record collection. The score to this film was nominated for an Oscar. I wonder what the story behind that is? It's a bizarre combination of weird outer space stuff and honky tonk piano like a puppet show or something. Weird!