Arthouse Auteur Neil Jordan Got REALLY Stupid with the Pervy, Inexplicably Dark Ghostbusters Knock-Off High Spirits
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The studio was reportedly very reluctant to release Tim Burton’s classic second film under the title Beetlejuice. They wanted a title that screamed “Comedy!” and “Ghosts!” Beetlejuice did neither. According to legend, the studio wanted to call it House Ghosts, leading a frustrated Burton to sarcastically suggest Scared Sheetless as a compromise the studio horrifyingly kind of liked.
Neil Jordan, another hotshot young director following up a breakthrough film with a 1988 ghost comedy, was not as lucky. The Academy-Award winning screenwriter of The Crying Game maintains that his film was taken from him, that he was locked out of the editing room and deprived of final cut. Jordan says that he shot a much different movie than the one that was released to vitriolic reviews and dire box-office but that movie is locked away in a vault somewhere, never to be seen. I’ve tried to start a campaign to get the filmmaker’s Director’s Cut formally released but so far my #ReleasetheJordanCut hashtag has only been used four times, and three of those were sarcastic.
I’m not sure that there’s a good movie in High Spirits but there’s no reason that a motion picture with this much going for it has to be so agonizingly bad. On paper at least, High Spirits has much more potential than most Ghostbusters knock-offs. It was written and directed by a novelist turned art house auteur behind two stylish, distinctive cult classics: 1984’s The Company of Wolves, an adult, intensely sexual meditation on the psychosexual underpinnings of classic fairy tales, and 1986’s Mona Lisa, a stylish Neo-noir that helped break Bob Hoskins as an international movie star.
High Spirits may or may not have begun as a project roughly analogous to The Company of Wolves. Only instead of Jordan getting all dark and Freudian with fairy tale lore, he’s be giving his literary, haunted spin on ghost and haunted house mythology. Somewhere along the line, however, High Spirits caught a terminal case of The Stupids. The film became very dumb and very American. High Spirits feels like it was slapped together by a flopsweat-drenched studio rather than hand-crafted by an artisan. It doesn’t just pale in comparison to Ghostbusters and Beetlejuice; it even falls short of the poorly received 1986 Sherman Helmsley vehicle Ghost Fever.
High Spirits at least has the decency to let us know that it will suck, and suck hard, immediately. It opens with the unseen voice of Peter O’Toole’s hapless and overwhelmed protagonist talking to a creditor eager to foreclose on his Irish castle. “Dear sir, I must once again remind you my first name is not Dick, nor is my last name Face. It is simply Peter, Peter Plunkett. No, I was not given a middle name, but had I been, I feel certain mother would not have chosen Low-Life Shit For Brains Peckerhead.” O’Toole sarcastically informs the American philistine on the other end of the line.
This does a horrifyingly good job of establishing the film’s juvenile tone. Jordan made movies for grown ups before but with High Spirits he didn’t just make a movie for babies and 12 year old boys: he made a movie for particularly stupid babies and 12 year olds. O’Toole plays bed and breakfast proprietor Peter Plunkett. He’s a real Dick Face Low Life Shit Good for Nothing Peckerhead who inherited a rundown Irish castle from his disappointed father and proceeded to run it into the ground.
The small businessman only has a few weeks to turn things around before he loses his ancestral home forever. In a fit of desperation, he markets the hotel to tourists as the most haunted castle in Ireland despite an inconvenient dearth of genuine paranormal activity. This spiel attracts a random gaggle of visitors, including a sexy bad girl played by Jennifer Tilly, a hunky priest on the verge of taking his vows played by Peter Gallagher and a paranormal investigator/muckraker who wants to expose the castle as a fraud.
But the most important and tedious tourists are two ugly Americans out of a sub-par knock off of The Lockhorns played by Steve Gutenberg and Beverly D’Angelo. They’re one of those charming cinematic couples whose defining characteristic is that they hate each other. Gutenberg just wants to have sex with his beautiful wife but she inevitably declines on the grounds that she’s sexually attracted to every man she encounters except for him.
The cash strapped castle owner and his staff do a terrible job faking supernatural goings-on but it turns out the castle is genuinely haunted, a veritable epicenter of ghostly shenanigans. There are ghosts and spirits rampaging through the castle, most notably a husband who murdered his wife two hundred years ago and is cursed to repeat the crime every night, seemingly for eternity, and his endlessly traumatized wife-turned-victim.
These are two of the main characters in a light comedy for children who love Ghostbusters but are literally willing to settle for anything else even vaguely ghost-related if it’s checked out. Oh, and I should also mention that the man who has been murdering his wife nightly for two centuries has an enormous penis. In this silly ghost comedy for children it’s established through dialogue that the homicidal maniac has an absolutely massive trouser snake. He’s got a package the size of the Empire State Building. It’s also canonical that Gallagher’s horny man of god also is packing a monster dong. When a very strong, very narratively necessary wind blows everyone’s clothes off, Gallagher’s plus-sized meat stick causes D’Angelo to observe lustily that apparently St. Patrick didn’t drive ALL the snakes out of Ireland!
You know how the Chad ghosts are: always murdering their wives and getting laid
High Spirits is, in its own gross, wildly inappropriate way, a movie about ghost busting, but in the sense that it’s about a creep who wants to bust inside a sexy lady ghost. It’s all about ghost-fucking and answering the eternal question, “Can ghosts do it?” Casting Liam Neeson as the well-hung ghost wife murderer only makes the character more egregiously out of place in a PG-13 ghost comedy.
Now you females always say you want a good man with good values and a good sense of humor that you can settle down and raise a family with but the truth is you are all addicted to tatted up bad boys, drug dealers and eighteenth century murder ghosts. Who is a bigger bad boy then an eight foot tall sexy Frankenstein with a Texas-sized love gopher who murders a woman he swore to love and protect every night for two hundred years? If you had to pick between a good man who is a good provider but a little shorter than average and not terribly exciting or a hot dead killer who will have degrading sex with you in between killing his ghost wife 100 percent of Y’all would choose the spectral slaughterer. Don’t hate. I’m only being real.
A light comedy would have to be VERY artful and sensitive for something like a brutal murder of a woman by her towering, terrifying husband repeated for eternity not to spoil the fun or ruin the mood. High Spirits is anything but artful and sensitive. It’s horny and stupid so it soon fixates on ghost-fucking through Gutenberg’s efforts to make the beast with two backs with someone who died two hundred years earlier.
Gutenberg’s aspiring ghost-shtuper is horny for Darryl Hannah’s ethereal beauty and he’s sexually frustrated by his wife’s lack of interest in him. So he crosses the line between life and death and ends up with a two hundred old version of the doomed ghost he REALLY does not want to have sex with, on account of her being an ancient monster.
Now you’re probably wondering whether the movie is able to forgive Neeson’s character for something as minor as murdering his wife every night for 200 hundred years. The answer is yes! He’s rewarded with a gorgeous, willing new partner in D’Angelo, who is willing to die in order to be with her wife-murdering soulmate forever. High Spirits is an exceptionally stupid, broad, inane monstrosity that never stops thinking up new ways to insult its audience. It’s not just bad by the standards of a Neil Jordan movie; it’s bad for a Reagan-era Steve Gutenberg vehicle as well.
Failure, fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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