Chris O
This is the best movie ever made. Too many negative reviews on here. If you like that sweet spot between bizarre/weird and horror than this is for you. Not super gory but chilling, spooky, and campy, like all William Castle movies.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
10/12/24
Full Review
dave s
Over the last fifteen or so years of his career, director William Castle was responsible for some odd films, ranging in quality from mediocre to poor. However, none were odder or crappier than his final directorial effort, 1974's Shanks. Mime Marcel Marceau plays Malcolm Shanks, a deaf puppeteer who, under the tutelage of a mad scientist (also played by Marceau) learns how to reanimate the dead. Thanks to some bad acting, an absurd story, and a score that seems to try to make a comedy out of what may have been intended as some sort of horror fantasy, Shanks is painful to watch from the get go, pretty much bereft of any sort of redeeming values.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
03/30/23
Full Review
Audience Member
I have mixed feelings about Shanks. It was quite innovative and quite daring to have a movie centered around so many non-speaking mimes.
Marcel Marceau plays the titular characters who is a mime and makes human dolls out of corpses using electronics wizardry.
Marceau is really quite wonderful. His expressions are creepy and off-putting, yet there is a childish playfulness to it.
The characters of the brother and sister were really good, and they were amazing as the reanimated doll corpses. They really looked and moved like a marionette would!
The bikers however, were extremely bad. From their really bad dialog and acting they didn't even feel like real people.
So there were some major faults in this film, but so many wonderful parts and subtle comedic moments.
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
02/27/23
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Audience Member
After apprenticing to a reclusive scientist, a deaf-mute puppeteer learns how to move corpses using electrodes operated by remote control. William Castle (!) directs Marcel Marceau (!) in this "grim fairy tale" mixing black comedy with pantomime slapstick and silent film aesthetics with an exploitation movie plot to create a movie like nothing else out there.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/08/23
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Audience Member
Odd, intriguing, grotesque, and sometimes tedious--Castle's uneven final film!!
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
02/22/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Shanks (William Castle, 1974)
I'm normally a big fan of William Castle and his one-trick-pony movies. The Tingler is one of the great guilty pleasures of filmdom. Dr. Sardonicus should have been called Dr. Hystericus. 13 Ghosts is one of the great haunted-house pictures of all time, and I can't even tell you what's so great about Homicidal because it'll give the game away, but trust me on this one. Short answer, as far as I'm concerned, Bill Castle's reputation as a B-film schlockmeister is pretty much undeserved; a number of his movies deserve the same A-list status that some of Hitch's more minor films got. Shanks, Castle's final directorial effort, is not one of those films.
This is the story of Malcolm Shanks (celebrated mime Marcel Marceau), whose only friend in the world is Old Walker (also played by Marceau), a mad scientist who has invented a way to reanimate and control the dead thanks to a machine he's built. When Walker keels over, Shanks learns to use the machine by experimenting on him. From there, he realizes that he can use the dead to make the living bend to his will...or to eliminate them when they get too uppity, like his shrewish sister and milquetoast brother-in-law. Meanwhile, Shanks, who's not the world's most well-socialized guy, is trying to figure out how to get involved with Celia (The Waltons' Cynthia Eilbacher), a lovely young pigtailed thing he thinks is hot. Things come to a head when a motorcycle gang invade Old Walker's house...
This is... um. How shall I say it? "A pile of elephant dung" will probably suffice. I find it very hard to believe that the same guy who made the movies I mentioned in the first paragraph made this (and I often wonder if he actually did; after all, "Lamberto Bava" directed Demons, but anyone with half a brain who's watched the sequel, which Bava actually DID direct, knows Dario Argento did a lot more than write and produce Demons). It's dull and plodding and hitchy and while it's possible to believe that this was simply a case where Castle's trademark gimmick simply failed, there's too much wrong with it to leave that as the only explanation for this mess. For example, Castle always had a way with actors, bringing out their best even in the silliest roles; here, there's actually a halfway decent cast, and no one, from Eilbacher to the glorious Helena Kallianiotes (Five Easy Pieces), has any clue what they're doing here from first frame to last. This can't be William Castle. It certainly can't be his last movie. Too much of my childhood is riding on that. *
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
02/11/23
Full Review
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