morrison-dylan-fan Planning to catch up on some TV and movie viewings over the weekend,I decided that I would kick the weekend off with a short and sweet Horror flick. Checking a box set that fellow IMDber Red-Barracuda had kindly sent me,I found a title that sounded like it would be a less than tormenting viewing.The plot:Becoming engaged to Meg Hubbard, Tom Stewart gets told by his old bit of skirt on the side Vi Mason that she will tell Hubbard about his cheating ways. Discussing this on the top of a lighthouse (mmm...) Mason leans on a loose railing and falls. Stewart has the chance to save her,but goes ho-hum and lets Mason fall to her death. Seeing her body floating in the water,Stewart goes to get it,but finds that it has transformed into seaweed. Thinking the matter is sorted,Stewart focuses on the wedding,but soon gets a ghostly torment.View on the film:Spotting the lighthouse before crashing into the low-rent Poverty Row rocks of the era, co-writer/ (with George Worthing Yates) director Bert I. Gordon & Kiss Me Deadly cinematographer Ernest Laszlo actually put some real effort into the movie,with the limited space of the lighthouse being caught in tight corner shots. Whilst they do throw in the usual things on visible wire tricks of the era, Gordon and Laszlo actually use neat trick shots to torment Stewart with overlapping images of ghostly footsteps and tracking shots to a broken playing record,and a walk down the aisle that smells the flowers with the stench of death.Teaming up with Them! Writer George Worthing Yates,the screenplay by Yates and Gordon puts the ghostly tale on Film Noir rocks,with a great thick line in pessimism that brings child killing to Stewart's mind. Making the relationships he has with women cynical, the writers bring out the tormenting with ghostly whispers boiling Stewart's mind, and leading to a bitter "romantic" ending. Haunted by the eerie screams Juli Reding gives Vi, Richard Carlson peels his beefcake looks off,as Stewart becomes tormented.

dougdoepke The final 10-minutes or so amounts to a neat wrinkle I didn't see coming. Too bad the rest of the ghost film is so utterly pedestrian. On the eve of his wedding to Meg (Sanders), Tom (Carlson) is confronted in a remote lighthouse by former lover, Vi (Reding). Unwilling to give up prospects of marrying into wealth, Tom allows Vi to fall into the ocean below, refusing to help as she dangles from the tower. Now he's haunted by her ghost, even as he continues his wedding plans.In my view, the material really needs a visual stylist to complement the spooky premise. As is, Director Gordon films in flat, high-key style thereby undercutting the eerie premise. Add a ghost who resembles Marilyn Monroe at her softest, and I was anything but repelled or even unsettled. Unfortunately, the occasional apparitions are about as scary as over-exposed film, which the effect likely is. If the writers were reaching for some kind of ghostly novelty, they got it, but at the movie's expense. Cast against type, a 50-year old wholesome Carlson fails to show much needed shadow of his own, and as a jazz musician and swain of a 20- year old cutie, he's a stretch. What the film does have is beguiling little 10-year old Susan Gordon (the director's daughter) as Meg's sister. She manages to steal the film in unobtrusive fashion unlike many Hollywood moppets. Also, catch Joe Turkel as the jive talking boat captain, apparently on loan from Kubrick and his iconic role in The Shining (1980). Otherwise, the 75-minutes amounts to an all-too-real bust, bombshell ghost or no.

BA_Harrison Jazz pianist Tom is a hit with the girls: not only is he all set to marry pretty young blonde Meg (who is quite the catch, coming from a very wealthy family) but he's also being pestered by voluptuous ex-flame Vi, who is still besotted with the musician. Hell, even his fiancé's 9 year old sister wants a piece of the smooth ivory tickler!In a last ditch effort to win back her man, Vi tracks down Tom to a derelict lighthouse where she threatens to reveal some of the jazz player's dirty secrets unless he comes back to her; during the ensuing heated argument, Vi leans against a faulty railing and is left hanging on for her life over jagged rocks. Despite her pleas for help, Tom leaves her to fall to her death, a course of action he begins to regret when her spirit comes back to haunt him.Tormented, a silly but still rather fun supernatural flick from legendary B-movie director Bert I. Gordon, also goes by the title 'Tormented... by the She-Ghost of Haunted Island!' which gives a much better idea of the cheezy goodness to be found within. The ghost effects are mostly crude and consequently very amusing, the dialogue is hilarious (especially Joe Turkel as a creepy tugboat captain who spouts beatnik slang) and the plot quite ridiculous. There are occasional hints of genuine creepiness, such as the scene in which a record repeatedly plays by itself, but a loud and crazy jazz soundtrack generally detracts from whatever spooky atmosphere there might otherwise have been.After the extreme tackiness of all that has gone before—the disembodied head, the crawling hand, the moaning spectre—Tormented's wonderfully downbeat ending comes as something of a (welcome) surprise: Tom considers killing his fiancé's young sister, falls from the lighthouse, and is reunited in death with Vi, whose corpse is discovered wearing the wedding ring that Tom had bought for Meg.

GL84 After his inactivity caused his mistress' death, a jazz pianist about to be married finds the dead woman's ghost haunting him wherever he goes and forcing him to resort to increasingly violent manners to keep his actions a secret.This was a pretty disappointing and really disjointed effort. One of the biggest issues present in the film is the rather banal efforts used in the haunting scenes that, while effective in continuing a present storyline, fail to really provide anything worth getting scared over. The scares are a never-ending series of floating voices only he can hear, disappearing appendages only he can see and whenever he goes to apprehend it finds it's not what he went after but something else entirely, and all the while this generates some lame scenes due to their repeating nature. As well, the lack of danger to the others around him makes it all pretty clear this might be simply a guilty conscience rather than a traditional ghost haunting, and the film does remarkably well at incorporating elements to make it seem that's the case here but that doesn't make for an exciting effort. The low-key nature of the material and middling pace don't help much either, and overall drag this one down enough to overcome the decent special effects to showcase the apparition which marks the film's only other bright spot.Today's Rating-PG: Violence.