Deaf-mute puppeteer, living with his despicable relatives, learns how to reanimate the dead from his employer; using the corpses of his step-sister and brother-in-law, he exacts revenge on a group of bikers who have crashed his castle. Ridiculous acting vehicle for mime extraordinaire Marcel Marceau, produced on the cheap in Vancouver and barely released by Paramount. Scare-master William Castle directs in a pedestrian, uncertain fashion--even the little bits and pieces that do come off well are eventually buried under the clumsy handling. A sequence where two corpses arise in unison in a country field has a small-scaled lunatic grandeur which might have been darkly comic under different circumstances; however, one doesn't know how to respond to the movie because it isn't directed toward any particular audience (it's too static and silly for adults, and too garish for kids). There's a strange romance in the film between Marceau (looking his age in a too-dark hairstyle borrowed from Tom Jones) and a teenage girl still wearing pigtails. Castle shows no finesse--it's as if he had never directed a picture before--while his cast appears understandably perplexed. The talented Helena Kallianiotes (playing a halter-top wearing biker chick in hoop earrings) stumbles about in a graveyard swilling vodka, sees a hand emerge from the earth, and stumbles away. Castle doesn't know how to make these incidents eerie and funny at the same time. With "Shanks", his final effort as director, he lost his touch. * from ****
Review of Shanks
