Jordan shrugged off the failure of High Spirits which remains something of an anomaly in an otherwise fascinating career.
Sadly, it’s a very astute piece of criticism. “This is the most pitiful supernatural shambles I’ve ever encountered,” quips one visitor to Plunkett Castle. It was met with a barrage of critical abuse when it opened and Darryl Hannah was “rewarded” with a Razzie nomination for wort Supporting Actress (she lost out to Kristy McNichol for Two Moon Junction). A sad spectacle and one we’d never have expected to have come from a talent like Jordan’s, though he has always maintained that the finished film doesn’t represent his vision and that he was locked out of the editing suite by producers Palace Pictures who felt that his version was just too dark. A spiralling budget was thrown to the wind and a nice, simple little tale, ripe with comic potential, self-destructed in a multi-coloured fireworks display of special effects and slapstick. High Spirits really needed to be a lot quieter and on a much smaller scale than this overblown, irritatingly noisy affair.
#High spirits cast how to#
Jordan clearly doesn’t have the faintest idea how to do knockabout slapstick comedy and seems to have left his baffled cast their own devices to disastrous effect. Performances are wildly inconsistent with O’Toole seemingly determined to chew any pit of scenery he can get his teeth into, Guttenberg trotting out his usual shtick again and everyone else just looks slightly embarrassed to be there. Not much about Jordan and McDowell’s script makes any sense – they can’t make up their minds if ghosts and mortals can actually touch for example – and for all the budget and the extraordinary talent on hand, the film often looks shoddy and cut-price. Jordan simply can’t sustain interest at a level we might have expected from the creator of Angel and The Company of Wolves, and the film all too often descends into a mindless, witless farce, so insecure that it resorts to a blaze of admittedly very good special effects in order to distract our attention. Inevitably such pace can’t be sustained forever, so it’s hardly a surprise that High Spirits falters the way it does. Indeed the plot proceeds at an almost breakneck pace as Jordan seems hell bent on delivering one of joke or sight gag (co-written with Michael McDowell) every thirty seconds or so. But no sooner have their first American guests Jack (Steve Guttenberg), Sharon (Beverly D’Angelo), Marge (Connie Booth), Brother Tony (Peter Gallagher) and Miranda (Jennifer Tilly) turned up than the castle’s real ghosts, Mary (Daryl Hannah) and Martin Brogan ((Liam Neeson) also show up and become romantically involved with some of their unwanted guests.ĭespite the patent emptiness and derivative nature of the proceedings, Jordan directs with considerable gusto. Up to his eyes in debt, Plunkett rebrands the B&B as “the most haunted castle in Europe” and employs locals to create ghostly characters to entertain and frighten potential guests. Peter Plunkett (Peter O’Toole) owns a run-down Irish castle which he converts into an unlikely bed and breakfast.
#High spirits cast movie#
An overkill of admittedly impressive special effects (supervised by Thunderbirds (1965-1966), Superman (1978) and Batman (1989) effects maestro Derek Meddings) in the early half of the movie threatens to swamp the game cast and puts undue pressure on a thin storyline that ultimately finds nowhere interesting to go. The film predictably falls apart as soon as the ghosts turn up and eventually degenerates into a simple-minded romantic farce. Despite a top flight cast that performs energetically enough (sometimes too energetically), this is a feeble and mirth-free comedy that replaces laughs with chaos and wit with noise. High Spirits was a surprising misfire from Angel (1982), The Company of Wolves (1984) and Mona Lisa (1986) director Neil Jordan, and a dispiriting return to the kind of knockabout haunted house comedies that flourished in the UK during the 1940s and 1950s – in particular it owes an unacknowledged debt to Henry Cass’ little seen Castle in the Air (1952) based on the play by Alan Melville.
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