Greg Goodsell here -- Legendary film producer William Castle looked upon the Earth and all was not good. His gimmick-laden features, popular in the late Fifties and early Sixties were passé, and he looked towards his most successful film to date -- ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968) and said, "I know! I'll make another European-styled art horror film!" The result was SHANKS, and well -- let's just say it's “interesting," if nothing else.
What won't let you down is the excellent Alex North musical score. Born Isadore Soifer, North is credited with the music to such epics as SPARTACUS, WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRIGINIA WOOLF, THE MISFITS and CLEOPATRA. He's also credited with another low-budget horror film score, WILLARD (1971) about a boy and his many rats. Leaving the earthly realm at the age of 81 in 1991, North's music score is one of the very best features of this odd duck of a feature.
The star of SHANKS is none other than pantomime legend Marcel Marceau, who is responsible for an entire race of pasty-faced, twee and ironic loose change hustlers dressed in Apache shirts clogging up major urban centers to this day! Marceau plays a deaf mute, and SHANKS is essentially a silent film with old style inter-titles!
Marceau plays Malcolm Shanks, a deaf-mute children’s entertainer in an undefined California town, although the film was largely shot in Canada. Some Marceau trivia for you: at the height of his fame, a 33 rpm player was released of his performance that included two sides of total silence ending with the audience cheering!
Marceau also plays the mad scientist in the film, who, astounded with Marceau's puppetry genius, decides to enlist him in some diabolical experiments!
Marceau goes to the mad scientist's crumbing mansion on the outskirts of town. Many have theorized that Tim Burton used many of the same themes and visual tropes in EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1991), what with a mad scientists’ lair bordering on suburbia, but it's doubtful Burton ever saw this as -- more about that later –
Superb atmospheric shots for a film that was obviously made with bread crumbs.
In the fading, Gothic manse, Malcolm Shanks begins his descent into the unknown!
As you see, the old man has some crazy theories about re-animating the dead!
Placing a few electrodes in a dead frog, the old man demonstrates to Malcolm that with his puppetry genius, he can make the dead once again return to life!
When he's not aiding a mad genius or entertaining the town's small children, poor Malcolm/Marceau is living in a hovel with his family –
This detestable duo, his drunkard brother (Philippe Clay) and his nagging shrew of a wife (Tsilla Chelton)! Marceau recruited these actors for their adeptness at pantomime. It's obvious these two had problems with the English language, and so Marceau and Castle limit their dialogue to an absolute minimum!
When Marceau/Malcolm returns to the mansion, he discovers the obvious –
His mysterious benefactor has croaked it! The makeup used here is very much in line for what William Castle whipped up for the old crone on a skateboard in his HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL back in 1958!
So, using a little ingenuity and know-how, Marcel wires up his deceased benefactor with some electrodes!
And using this remote control doo-hickey –
THE DEAD WALK AGAIN! And here we run into the first of many of SHANKS' problems. Unlike the autonomous zombies in the horror films before and since, these reanimated corpses are inert pieces of flesh that need constant manipulation! As we shall see, this has lots of complications down the road -- and they don't address the fact that these upright slabs of beef would start to smell pretty bad straightaway, either!
Shanks' no good brother confronts him at the manse, asking "WHERE IS MY MONEY," and –
- In a delirious moment of utterly surreal horror, a bantam rooster begins to walk up the palooka -- SIDEWAYS! Bro flips out, runs up the stairs, cracks his noggin, and dies!
Quid pro quo, brother is resurrected as a remote-controlled zombie, along with his nagging wife!
Malcolm has his fun, in what amounts to an extended Shields and Yarnell sketch!
BOING! Funny what some cleverly concealed skis will do!
Shanks takes his reanimated family to the market under the wily sheriff's nose!
William Castle puts in a cameo, like his chief rival AND idol, Alfred Hitchcock as the grocer!
The happy family catches this young girl's (Cindy Eilbacher) eye, and Malcolm invites her to a picnic!
Malcolm amuses her with some prancing, dancing and light romancing.
The lassie inspects one of Malcolm's relatives and she realizes that they're literally DEADSVILLE!
She flees in horror, but Malcolm is able to persuade her that the dead can't harm the living!
"There, there Mon amour, they can't hurt you," Marcel seems to say. But he's a deaf mute.
Malcolm then invites his too-young lady friend to a very grotesque dinner party, with brother and sis as less than nimble servants!
It is here that SHANKS goes straight down the toilet, never to recover. A biker gang on loan from an AIP programmer comes roaring into the mansion, raises a ruckus, and it becomes clearly obvious that Shanks' reanimated brood has NO PRACTICAL BATTLEFIELD APPLICATION WHATSOEVER! All the resurrected dead folk just stand there and look creepy! I'm sure these brawny bikers have had worse things thrown at them in the past! I'm not going to waste pictures or bore you with the details!
Well, I'll give you this nifty action shot, anyway –
It's ironic that one of the bikers here is played by none other than DON CALFA, who would have similar bad luck with reanimated corpses in the cult classic RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD in 1985!
This is so LAME and badly staged, we won't go there.
Here comes the breaking point that sent the few people who saw this in the theater towards the exit (just as well as it's one of the final shots). The character of Shanks was originally scripted to be a small boy, and so this teenaged girl was originally thought of as a "big sister figure." With the very middle-aged Marcel Marceau courting her, SHANKS became something of a paean to pedophilia! When the bikers kill her and Shanks resurrects her, it becomes an ode to necrophilia as well! GRROOOOOOOOOSSSSSSS!
Blessed with a "cop-out" is-it-only-a-dream? ending, SHANKS has its moments of fairytale beauty but is mostly a bungled mélange of disparate elements. Very few saw this film when it was spottily released. Fate had one more trick to play upon producer William Castle, when his last film BUG (1975) was released the very same week as another monster picture, one that went by the name of JAWS! We'll leave you with this image, which probably held a lot of personal symbolism for the once grand showman --
So here's the final installment of our quasi-tribute to Bill Castle, and would you be able to guess? Yes, it's an odd one, and just to prove, that just like William Castle, we can never be trusted, here's just a touch of what you will find inside this box of eye candy! I had this already done, and it was too cool to leave behind, here's "PROJECT X"!
Here's some information I find particularly interesting, The first film made with the title "Project X" was in 1949, and it was about a guy getting blackmailed into stealing a secret atomic energy plan, then there is William Castle's title in 1968, a film about the future, and keeping secrets from The Chinese, next, there was a film called "Project X" that was released in 1987 about Matthew Broderick and some monkeys, and finally there was a "Project X" released this year that is about an out of control high school party! My how things degrade over time!
The year is 2018, but I swear I heard them say it was 150 years in the future! The guy in the tube is THE Hagen Arnold, the rest of them are a bunch of military men and scientists that don't know how to dress worth a crap! Throw away your sun glasses, the future ain't looking that bright for fashion! The small cast is fleshed out by Sheila (The Busy Body) Bartold, Phillip (Lost Missile, Phantom From 10,000 Leagues) Pine, Harold (Freaky Friday) Gould, Ivan (General Hospital) Bonar, Henry (Vertigo) Jones, and Charles (3 Nuts In Search Of A Bolt) Irving!
Talk about a horror show, Governor Jerry Brown even makes an appearance in Linda Ronstadt's gold record vault! Speaking of gold records, the very special music for "Project X" was created by Nathan Van Cleave! Van Cleave was a pioneer in the use of the theremin, and besides "The Colossus Of New York," and "Robinson Crusoe On Mars," he worked on many episodes of "The Twilight Zone!" The Lowrey Organ also got credits!
The first twenty minutes or so drag on forever, but it's a complicated story to set up. A spy comes back from China with secrets and artificially induced amnesia, is cryogenically frozen, and revived, and given a new simpler identity, so they can get inside his head and get the suppressed secrets that hold the fate of the whole world out of him. Since the spy was also a historian and an expert on the 1960's, they choose this headline and character from the past to make him think he is now a bank robber!
Christopher George puts in a fine performance as Hagen Arnold! George had a real familiar face to the people of the time because he had just come off a two year, 58 episode run as Sergeant Sam Troy, the star of TV's "Rat Patrol!" When he wakes up, he finds himself on the lam, and they proceed to a fake farmhouse the government has set up to hide out!
Once everything settles down, the scientists drug Hagen Arnold, hook him up, and start digging around inside his psyche!
The gates to the portals of Hagen's mind open wide to let the government in....
....and they can watch and listen to the whole thing in psychedelic wide screen HD!
To make the facade look authentic 60's, they had to toss around some men's magazines!
Hagen doesn't like being cooped up, so after a couple of days, they let him escape, and he accidently meets with one of the future locals absent from her job at either the kinnery, or the cannery. 
The perky Greta Baldwin is Karen Summers! She gets second billing in the credits even though her part has essentially no reason to even exist, except they needed to get a good looking woman into the cast somehow! Greta was in one other movie in the same year titled "Rogue's Gallery," and that was it for her! Other than that, it's very difficult to find any other info about her! 
Somebody had some solid ideas about the future. Here Karen is given what appears to be an electronic cigarette to wile away her time!
There are some great animated sequences from the Hanna-Barbera Studios, and the combined comics genius minds of Alex (Space Ghost) Toth and Carl (Scooby-Doo) Urbano!
Give William Castle some credit, he actually used a Chinese guy named Keye Luke to play the role of the Asian leader Sen Chiu! Sen Chiu proclaims several times in this long drawn out speech, that just like Lucky of last week, he too, is indeed, Inscrutable!!!
The future of Asia! That tube is taking Hagen Arnold into a futuristic underwater prison! They don't take up space topside, and they are also used to raise food! Pretty elaborate for what looked like a prison for only one person!
Hagen Arnold is rescued from the prison by his scuba diving partner, co-pilot and buddy, Monte Markham as the unpredictable Gregory Gallea! Monte has been on countless TV shows over the years, and is still gainfully employed with films set to come out this and next year!
Can this dynamic duo possibly break on through the doors of perception to the other side?
Later, something akin to "Forbidden Planet's" Id has escaped from Hagen Arnold's mind because they peered into his brain longer than they were supposed to, and it's reeking terror and destruction on Karen Summers and Gregory Gallea!!
The super familiar face of a man with a similarly common name Henry Jones, as Dr. Crowther peers in on what is now left of Gregory Gallea. They squeezed all the answers out of Gallea's brain like a giant zit, and the world continues to be a safe place to live!
They wipe Hagen Arnold's brain clean once more, give him another new identiy, and him and Karen get to live together happily ever after, William Castle style!!
