Cinema: The Old Quartet

GHOST STORY

Directed by John Irvin Screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen

You would think, as long as they were making a movie that announces its business with so stark a title, they would have bothered to conjure up a genuinely spooky spook. Not a bit of it. Every once in a while there is a brief frisson when the specter is revealed to be wearing several pounds of yucky decayed-corpse makeup instead of Actress Alice Krige’s pretty face. But since these moments arise out of a script that appears to have been mailed in from another planet and directed by the spirit of the living dead, they are with out any emotional charge. And since Krige has proved herself a performer of range and spirit in Chariots of Fire, the failure to employ her as something more than a mannequin is particularly galling.

Such grand figures as Fred Astaire, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., John Houseman and the late Melvyn Douglas were recruited to play the aged versions of the young men who did the Krige character deadly wrong a half-century before. Nobody has provided a decent line for any of them to say, let alone a scene that would allow them a memorable moment of fright or, for that matter, a shadow of the wit and style that had been bred into all their bones. The whole enterprise is as thin as an unoccupied shroud, less menacing than a Mickey Mouse cartoon and about as entertaining as an airline departure lounge.

— By Richard Schickel