The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966)

The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini is an amazing movie! It's amazing that producers Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson could pull together so much talent and make such a bad movie. American International Pictures (A.I.P) is often credited for being the launching pad for many prominent actors and directors (Jack Nicholson and Francis Ford Coppola, to name a few), but it was also where many actors finished their careers as well (Karloff, Rathbone, Peter Lorre, and Buster Keaton).  Therefore, it is a real curio to see Boris Karloff and  Basil Rathbone sharing the screen with former Disney star Tommy Kirk, Nancy Sinatra, Aron Kincaid, and would be starlet Susan Hart (future wife of producer Nicholson).  Karloff at least seems to be having fun in his extended cameo, while Rathbone can never shake off his embarrassment.  The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini is a disaster of movie, but like most disasters you are compelled watch, despite your better judgement.

The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini is often considered to be the last of the A.I.P Beach movies, but I think a more accurate description would be that it was a failed attempt at trying to reinvent the formula. The beach setting had out lived its usefulness, so the most logical thing was to take the party on the road. In Ski Party, our gang of lovable beach bums relocated to the slopes of Denver. In Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, the party is moved to a......haunted house. This was not the first attempt by A.I.P to meld the beach movie and horror genres; in 1965 they released Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, which had Vincent Price co-starring with beach movie regulars Frankie Avalon and Dwayne Hickman.  It's interesting to note that Karloff, Price, and Peter Lorre all had cameos in the first three beach movies; Priced played a beatnik poet (Beach Party), Lorre, the owner of a gym(Muscle Beach Party) and Karloff, an art critic (Bikini Beach).

Not only is there a change a scenery, but a change in the cast as well. It is apparent that A.I.P was hoping that a different cast of characters would breathe life into the tired formula; the only returning character is Harvey Lembeck's dimwitted motorcyclist, Eric Von Zipper. Tommy Kirk and Deborah Walley are given the Frankie and Annette roles, while Aron Kincaid is given the role of the dopey party goer; a role usually reserved for Jody McCrea. The problem is that there really isn't a central character that the audience can relate to. Who is the main character in The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini?  In theory, Chuck (Tommy Kirk) should be the main character, but he is off screen for significant portions of the film and often takes a backseat to  Bobby's (Aron Kincaid) histrionics. The previous films centered around Frankie and Annette's often turbulent relationship; you may not necessarily like the characters, but at least there was a solid framework to hang the story on. The budding romance between Chuck and Lili (Deborah Walley) seems like an afterthought on the part of the filmmakers. When Lili first meets Chuck she is a bit apprehensive towards him, but changes her tune at the flip of a switch. Chuck and Lili's romance should be the heart of the film, but the film makers abandon it to make way for nonstop rock n' roll numbers and "hilarious" slapstick comedy. Walley isn't really given much to do, except play the damsel in distress at the film's climax.

The same flaw applies towards the Bobby/ Vicki story line. Vicki (Nancy Sinatra), for some inexplicable reason, hopes to spark a romance with Bobby, but he has wandering eyes. This nearly costs Bobby his life as the woman he keeps drooling over, Sinistra, is a would be a murderer. Luckily for him, her eye sight is extremely poor and instead of offing him, she ends up destroying a knight's armor and a bust of Julius Caesar.  This subplot takes up the entire midsection the film, only to be forgotten in the last half hour. This is a recurring theme in  The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, a character or story line will be introduced, only to be discarded later on. It is an extremely overcrowded film. Other than continuity, why bring back Eric Von Zipper? He doesn't really add anything to the proceedings. In the previous films he was the main villain, or at least tried to be, in this film he is a helpless bystander.

If IMDB and Wikipedia are correct, then the scenes with Karloff and Susan Hart were added after principle photography had finished, thus adding more unnecessary characters into the mix. Boris Karloff plays a Hiram Stokely, a recently deceased carnival man who has 24 hours to do one good deed if he wants to enter heaven. The catch is that he must do it from the confines of his crypt, so he sends down Cecily (the title character) to make sure his heirs (Chuck, Lili, and the eccentric Myrtle Forbush) get their rightful share of his fortune. His shady lawyer, Reginald Ripper (Basil Rathbone), hopes to scare away Hiram's beneficiaries, so he can keep the inheritance for himself. This is the movie's plot, but again, the film doesn't treat this story line with any real sense of urgency. Even worse is the fact that Cecily, despite being a ghost and being able to go unobserved, is pretty useless for the most part. She, on occasion, will play practical jokes on Ripper, but she rarely lifts a finger to help the protagonists; at least for the first 75 minutes of the movie. Cecily will often pop into frame (she is tinted blue for a ghostly effect), mug it up for a few seconds, and then promptly disappear.

At the film's climax, when Lili is in danger of being cut in half by a buzz saw (while tied to a log), Cecily stands in the corner and screams at Chuck to save her. Why doesn't Cecily stop the buzz saw herself?  She does dispose of Reginald Ripper by jamming his gun with her finger, but that could have easily been avoided had she acted a lot sooner.  The filmmakers try to imply that she is influencing the movement of the characters by having her whisper stuff in their ears; at one point she pops into frame and tells Vicki to wear a bikini, because it will get Bobby's attention. This idea never comes off as well as it should, mainly due to the poor execution of the gag;  a character will often be in mid sentence when the film suddenly freezes, just then Cecily materializes into frame and whispers something into his/her ear. After having dispensed her advice, Cecily abruptly disappears, the film resumes, and the character will repeat what Cecily just said. It happens a couple of times throughout the film, but it's only real function is to make Susan Hart's role seem bigger than it actually is.

The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini is a complete mess of a film, but it's a beautiful mess; the cinematography by Stanley Cortez is extremely first rate. It's a shame that his talents were wasted on an extremely silly film like this.  He creates a genuinely spooky atmosphere, especially during Sinistra's musical number in which she seemingly melts into the shadows. The musical numbers themselves are pretty forgettable, though I do have a soft spot for the song "Geronimo," performed by Nancy Sinatra. It's not a great song, but it is rather catchy. Plus, forgettable rock n' roll songs were a staple in the beach movies, so why should The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini prove to be the exception?

Other things I like about The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini:

1) The double act of Tommy Kirk and Aron Kincaid is fairly funny at times; Kirk is such a bland actor that he perfectly balances out Kincaid's over zealous performance. The problem is that the film only pairs them together for a few scenes, thus wasting a potentially funny comedy team. Their scenes together play like a mini-remake of the wax museum scene in Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein; Kincaid is the scaredy cat, while Kirk tries to be the voice of reason. However, just Lou Costello in the earlier film, Kincaid's fears are justified. I rather like Aron Kincaid, he's a fairly energetic and fun performer to watch. He also later voiced Killer Croc on Batman: The Animated Series; that alone makes him awesome.

2) The opening scene with Hiram and Cecily is fairly amusing and often funny, especially when she drops the bomb that he is dead. Karloff is pretty adept at comedy, so is Susan Hart for that matter (she is genuinely funny in Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine as the bikini clad fembot). There's great interplay between the two actors that it's a shame that it amounts to very little as this scene is pretty disconnected from rest of the movie.

Interesting piece of trivia: the opening shot of the film (of Cecily in a red hood walking through a cemetery) was lifted from the Vincent  Price/ Roger Corman thriller The Haunted Palace. A.I.P was known for it's an extreme cheapness and would often lift footage from their previous films to pad out the running time of their latest release.

3) Nancy Sinatra is by no means a good actress, but she has a likable screen presence. You almost  care about the plight of Vicki....I say almost, because the character completely vanishes in the movie's second half. Though, she is in the final shot of the film; her and Bobby are dancing and having a groovy time, when all of a sudden Cecily materializes into frame. Bobby goes in for a kiss, but Cecily disappears. Bobby and Vicki shrug if off and resume their dancing. Fade to black. The end.

4) The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini maybe one of the earliest postmodern films in that the characters are constantly acknowledging the fact that they are in a movie. In one scene, Eric Von Zipper and his gang spot Reginald Ripper entering a secret passage and Zipper remarks that he looks like "Sherlock Holmes." The movie film will often cut back to Karloff commenting on the action as if he is a member of the audience; he's watching events unfold from a crystal ball inside his crypt.

There a plenty of amusing moments in the movie, but for every good idea there are, at least, two bad ones. It's an extremely disjointed picture that could have been easily improved in the editing room, or if they had taken the time to rewrite the script. Instead of adding more characters, they should have written a few out of the script. Buster Keaton was originally slated to played Chief Chicken Father, but, sadly, passed away before filming began. The filmmakers, rather than write out the character, decided to recast the role with
Benny Rubin and let's just say he doesn't hold a candle to the Great Stone Face.

Credits
Cast:  Boris Karloff (Hiram Stokely - The Corpse), Susan Hart (Cecily - The Ghost), Tommy Kirk (Chuck Phillips), Aron Kincaid (Bobby), Basil Rathbone (Reginald Ripper), Deborah Walley (Lili Morton), Nancy Sinatra (Vicki), Patsy Kelly (Myrtle Forbush), Harvey Lembeck (Eric Von Zipper), Jesse White (J. Sinister Hulk), Quinn O' Hara (Sinistra), Bobbi Shaw (Princess Yolanda), Benny Rubin (Chicken Feather), Francis X. Bushman (Malcolm), Piccola Pupa (Herself), Andy Romano (J.D.), Albert Nelson (Puss), Myrna Ross (Boots), The Bobby Fuller Four (themselves).

Director: Don Weis
Screenplay: Louis M. Heyward, Elwood Ullman.
Running Time: 83 min.

Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942)

Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon was my first introduction to the world famous sleuth; I was in 8th grade at the time and out of sheer boredom (it was 2 AM on a Friday night) I popped in my dad’s video copy (COLORIZED) in the VCR, and I have been hooked ever since. Whenever there was a Sherlock Holmes movie on television, I had to watch it.  However, the Rathbone-Bruce films weren't enough to quench my thirst, so I eventually turned to the Arthur Conan Doyle short stories; I bought "The Classic Illustrated Sherlock Holmes" and absolutely ate it up. What’s amazing about Doyle’s character is how he has transcended time; Sherlock Holmes is just as relevant now as he was in Victorian London. The TV show Sherlock was not the first adaptation to transpose Doyle’s creation to a modern day setting; the Universal series did the same thing in the 1940s by setting it against the backdrop of World War II. In the early films, Holmes was often pitted against Nazi agents. In The Secret Weapon,  a Swiss scientist, Dr. Tobel, has invented a bombsight that the Nazi’s desperately want and it is up to Holmes to see that it does not fall into their hands.

The plot is secondary in a movie like this; the real joy of the Universal Sherlock Holmes series was seeing Basil Rathbone’s definitive take on the Doyle character (sorry, Jeremy Brett fans). Indeed, part of the fun is watching Holmes don various disguises to either evade or locate his enemy. In the Secret Weapon he disguises himself as:  an elderly, German book dealer, a Lascar sailor named  Rum Sangh, and Frederic Hoffner, a scientist. It's amazing how Rathbone completely loses himself in these characterizations; often to the point that you forget it's Sherlock Holmes in disguise. There was never any sense that Rathbone was phoning in his performance, despite starring in 14 Sherlock Holmes movies from 1939 to 1946. Rathbone is extremely energetic in the role of Sherlock Holmes and is always fun to watch; check out his musical number in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It's a fairly gratuitous moment, but an absolute delight as well. Holmes dons the disguise of a music hall performer and sings "I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside" at a garden party.

Rathbone is well matched by Lionel Atwill's ratlike portrayal of Professor Moriarty. In the Rathbone series, Moriarty was played by three distinct actors: George Zucco, Lionel Atwill, and Henry Daniell. Each of them gave a fairly distinct performance, but Atwill was my favorite. His Moriarty was a complete slime bag and gave off a foul odor.  Zucco and Daniell were fairly dignified in their roles, but Atwill's Moriarty is absolutely shameless, as Holmes often points out. Zucco and Daniell's Moriarty lived in lavish settings, Atwill's lives in a complete dive. Yet, there is a mutual respect between him and Holmes; Moriarty even regrets having to kill Holmes, because he is the only worthy adversary out there. The battle of wits between Holmes and the "Napoleon of Crime" are among the best scenes in the movie, as well as in the entire series. Rathbone and Atwill had a wonderful dynamic that it's no wonder they were often cast opposite one another; their most famous pairing was in Son of Frankenstein, in which Atwill gave a commanding performance as the wooden armed Inspector Krogh, while Rathbone hammed it up in the role of the title character.

Nigel Bruce has often been a source of controversy among die hard Sherlock Holmes fans, there are many who resent his bumbling portrayal of Dr. Watson. I, personally, rather enjoy Bruce's comedic take on the character.  Of course, this is largely due to the fact that the Rathbone/Bruce films were my first exposure to Sherlock Holmes. In the Arthur Conan Doyle stories, Watson isn't really much of a character, his main function is that of a narrator, hence he often gets lost in the shuffle (the two exceptions being Hound of the Baskervilles and The Sign of Four). The literary stories are told from the first person point of view, but when adapted into film, Watson's narration is unnecessary, not to mention redundant. Watson is essentially Holmes sidekick, therefore the logical solution would make him the comedy relief. This change boils the blood of many purists, but Bruce is a good enough actor that Watson's bumbling antics never become a stumbling block. It also helps that Rathbone and him have excellent chemistry; the two of them effortlessly work off one another. Watson maybe a bit clueless at times, but he's extremely loyal to his temperamental friend, and is often brave when the moment calls for it.

It's interesting to note that in The Secret Weapon, Watson and the equally inept Inspector Lestrade (Dennis Hoey) save Holmes not once, but twice from certain death. The first time, Holmes is tied up and placed in the false bottom of a trunk; Moriarty instructs his two lackeys to take the truck and dump it into the ocean. The two men are on their way, when they run into Lestrade and Watson. Lestrade demands to see the contents of the trunk, the men open it up, revealing tools on top. At first, Lestrade is taken in by the ruse and send the men on their way, but Watson notices that the trunk is unusually heavy for something containing a few tools. A light bulb goes off in Lestrade's head and he calls out after the two men; they panic and drop the trunk, thus saving our hero from certain peril.  Later on, just when it seems Moriarty is going to put a bullet in Holmes head, the dimwitted duo arrive just in the nick of time, once again prolonging the life of the famous sleuth.

The was the first entry directed by Roy William Neill, who would go on the direct the remaining films in the series. Neill's greatest accomplishment is how he managed to keep things moving at a brisk pace; there is  almost no let up in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon. Holmes is almost always on the move, be it walking through the desolated streets of London (this film takes place during the German air raids), or frequenting the many swill holes in London in an effort to locate Professor Moriarty. Neill's efficient direction becomes even apparent when you compare the Rathbone films to the Arthur Wortner adaptations of the 30s. Wortner made for an excellent Holmes; he was much more subdued in his portrayal than Rathbone. However, his Sherlock Holmes films are quite a chore to sit through due to the pedestrian direction; they are sluggish in spots, to the point where they make Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey seem like a Michael Bay film. Also, the editing is extremely choppy that it's often hard to tell where one character is in relation to another. Wortner gives it his all, but sadly, even his performance can't redeem these stale films. The Rathbone/Bruce films may not be most faithful of adaptations, but they are a lot of fun. Even the worst film in the series, Pursuit to Algiers, is still worth a look.

Credits.
Cast: Basil Rathbone (Sherlock Holmes), Nigel Bruce (Dr. Watson), Lionel Atwill (Moriarty), Dennis Hoey (Inspector Lestrade), Kaaren Verne (Charlotte Eberli), William Post, Jr. (Dr. Franz Tobel), Holmes Herbert (Sir Reginald Dailey), Mary Gordon (Mrs. Hudson).
Director: Roy William Neill
Screenplay: Edward T. Lowe Jr., Scott Darling, Edmund L. Hartmann. Based on “The Dancing Men” by Arthur Conan Doyle.
Running Time: 68 min.