Tuesday, September 19, 2017
Forgotten Movies; GHOST STORY
This was a bit of a disappointment.I am not sure why the story seemed laid out poorly. And the acting was strange. Especially Craig Wasson, whose acting style didn't jibe at all with the four older actors. I loved the book and think if I read it again now I would still like it because there are good bones here. I think the direction is poor too. Perhaps the limitations of four elderly men impeded it as well. Also there was an awful lot of story to be told.
In summary: Four successful elderly gentlemen, members of the Chowder Society, share a gruesome, 50-year old secret. When one of Edward Wanderley's twin sons dies in a bizarre accident, the group begins to see a pattern of frightening events developing.
Read the book, skip the movie.
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11 comments:
I read the book first and it scared me badly enough that I had trouble making it through the movie
Yes, the book was much scarier than the movie from what I remember of the book.
I agree with you, Patti. Straub can be long-winded, but I liked the book a lot. The movie was so so. I never thought much of Craig Wasson, who seemed to be everywhere for a few years (FOUR FRIENDS, GHOST STORY, BODY DOUBLE) but has disappeared since. At least, I haven't seen him in years. Just checked. His last credit was 2006.
I've often found that books tell the story better than the film versions do, Patti...
The book was one of the best ghost stories I had read at that time. And I don't remember disliking the movie as much then as now. And I wonder if we just have better ways of telling ghost stories now.
Not a great movie, but I found it mildly entertaining. The book, as you and others have noted, was leagues better.
Thanks for the heads up. I've been on a losing streak of watching BAD MOVIES lately and I will certainly avoid this one!
A weak adaptation of a fantastic novel. I didn't really like the movie at all. Even Fred Astaire was boring. Imagine! Not seen it since I saw it in the theaters many years ago. That they chose to focus on the older men was a mistake. A large portion of the book is about a teen age boy and what happens to him is much more interesting and genuinely terrifying compared to the supposedly main plot about the death of the women that's haunted the four men. The movie theater sequence when the boy is watching Night of the Living Dead was genius. Not in the movie for a variety of reasons. Still, Alice Krige was pretty impressive as the ghost in an otherwise extremely mediocre movie. I think this basically launched her US movie/TV career.
Well. late to the dance, as usual but with a different slant on the thing. I saw the movie first. Scared the bejeebies out of me, and the suspense was well enuf executed to keep me from critically appraising it (which I do anyway only if a movie is so bad I don't enjoy it at all). Then I read the book--the first and only by Straub for me--and, of course the story made a lot more sense than the movie had. But that opening scene in the movie is what sticks with me. Had I been standing near a floor-length window several stories up when I watched that scene I might have jumped thru the glass, too.
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