High Spirits

If clever camera work and excellent special effects were all it took to make a good movie, this would be a hands-down winner. Unfortunately, the technology here is wasted on an unbelievable, tediously trite, and decidedly unfunny story. Peter O' Toole is shamelessly histrionic in his portrayal of Peter Plunkett, a broke (and broken) man who can't meet the mortgage payments on his Irish castle. He decides to turn the place into a tourist trap, replete with fake ghosts, fake banshees, fake mummies, and fake acting. Who shows up? A tart, a would-be priest for her to work on, a shrew whose daddy owns the mortgage on the castle (Beverly D'Angelo), her idiotic-but-good-hearted husband (Steve Guttenberg), a moronic parapsychologist, and a Perfectly Pedestrian American Family (ostensibly, to provide child humor relief). O'Toole's grand "scare" fails miserably--until two real ghosts appear (Darryl Hannah and Liam Neeson). Hannah is doomed to be murdered every night by her husband Neeson, until Guttenberg accidentally steps in--and, eschewing common sense for the sake of the plot--immediately falls in love with her, no questions asked. Predictably, everyone winds up happy in this teen-oriented comedy--happiness, apparently, being defined as extramarital sex with strangers (preferably ghosts), while consuming prodigious amounts of alcohol. Not recommended. (R. Pitman)