The Spirit is Willing (USA, 1967) 100 min color DIR-PROD: William Castle. SCR: Ben Star, based on The Visitors, by Nathaniel Benchley. MUSIC: Vic Mizzy. DOP: Harold E. Stine. CAST: Sid Caesar, Vera Miles, Barry Gordon, John McGiver, Cass Daley, Ricky Cordell. (Olive Films)
This movie starts off with a philandering man and his female tryst murdered by his wife, who then kills herself. These three ghosts inhabit the house, which is rented for the summer by Ben Powell (Sid Caesar), with his wife Kate (Vera Miles) and their brat son Steve (Barry Gordon). This prologue has just the right kind of bouncy comic energy to set the tone for the rest of this horror spoof.
The Spirit is Willing is nothing if not energy, so much action in the frame and so much mysterious business (Jill Townsend plays three different roles!), and sexual misunderstandings; perhaps this is all to disguise Ben Starr’s thin script (based on Nathaniel Benchley’s novel). Director-producer William Castle’s comic horror (made just after a film in the same vein, Let’s Kill Uncle) is amusing, culminating into a climax at a costume party where the ghosts get confused with the living characters, but it is still rather flat, despite all of the shenanigans onscreen. This live action cartoon will explain why Paramount would only let Castle produce Rosemary’s Baby instead of direct. When horror was growing up, his films were still aiming for the kiddies.
The Spirit is Willing is released to DVD by Olive Films, in a typically bare-bones presentation. Olive had also put out another late 1960s William Castle offering, Project X.
Originally published in Vol. #1, Issue 25.
Greg Woods
Greg Woods has been a film enthusiast since his teens, and began his writing "career" at the same time- prolific in capsule reviews of everything he had watched, first on index cards, then those hardcover dollar store black journals, then an old Mac IIsi. He founded The Eclectic Screening Room in 2001, as a portal to share his film love with the world, and find some like-minded enthusiasts along the way. In addition to having worked in the film industry for over two decades, he has been a co-programmer of films at Trash Palace, and a programmer/co-founder of the Toronto Film Noir Syndicate. He has also written for Broken Pencil, CU-Confidential, Micro-Film, and is currently working on his first novel. His secret desire is for someone to interview him for a podcast or a DVD extra.