The Ghost Writer (1990)

 

Director: Alan Rafkin

Screenplay: Alan Spencer

Cast: Anthony Perkins as Anthony Strack; Leigh Taylor-Young as Elizabeth Strack; Joshua John Miller as Edgar Strack (as Josh Miller); Juliet Sorci as Cindy Strack; Pam Matteson as Miss Blasko

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows) #33

 

Let me have a bit of man to hanged man talk.

Looking for some horror television ephemera, I spotted an unaired Anthony Perkins project, a pilot for a horror tinged sitcom two years before his death shot in front of a live audience and written by Alan Spencer, who worked on the Dirty Harry/Action film cop comedy parody Sledge Hammer! (1986-88). It is intriguing on paper and, with Anthony Perkins in the limelight as Anthony Strack, a successful horror author with his newly married second wife attempting to adapt to his macabre lifestyle, it offers a lot to a talented actor who was sadly type casted by Norman Bates in Psycho (1960). The irony is that Bates was an incredible performance from him if you return to it, so the typecasting was tragic entirely because people did not consider his acting talents could be stretched beyond such characters. So if anything, the show even if what reminded was an unfinished and un-premiered television pilot could still show Perkins doing comedy, which was enticing.

It definitely gives him a great entrance, for this pilot which is only available even with a clock on the left, from its surviving video source,  when he walks in to his new wife Elizabeth (Leigh Taylor-Young) carrying a medieval axe nonchalantly. Strack is an author who, living up to his reputation, lives in a gothic mansion where he earnings have helped acquire the spookiest atmosphere, full of occult objects, books, and even torture and execution devices as ornaments like an Iron Maiden. After the tragic death of his first wife, falling down the stairs, his new wife is trying her hardest to deal with her new surroundings whilst his new step-daughter, a child, is immediately creped out by the new location. It does not help his biological son Edger (Joshua John Miller) is a strange and morbid new sibling, and the housekeeper is a buxom witchy woman with striking red/orange hair able to squeeze an orange into juice directly in a glass without tools. That and her weird relationship with Edger which gets into sexual innuendo that would be far more inappropriate in the modern day; that and the one weirdly incestuous joke where Perkins' Strack comments his son is one of the only people happy to be spanked for bad behaviour.

This is on paper what happens when a suburbia yuppie remarried into the Addams Family, with more for an adult audience or at least jokes meant to get a reaction from the live audience whilst not going too far. As a sitcom, it is shot with fixed cameras on sets, though there is some creativity on display, showing Strack trying to come up with new ideas in one scene by having actors play out a plan for one in the background, the background entirely in darkness until a light illuminates a brother at the funeral of the other sibling in a creative touch. For the most part though, it is mostly the production design which is elaborate, even in the VHS fuzz, appropriately atmospheric and fur for a show playing to ghoulish laughs, like Edgar playing with a guillotine in the background with magic show effects transpiring. They even created a cooked pig puppet for one scene, spitting out an apple at Perkins, all for a single gag of why you need to cook your meat thoroughly, or an entire graveyard set for father-son reconciliation involving a gravedigger too fond of wanting to show Strack around at all the graves of people who died in interesting ways.

Tragically, The Ghost Writer is also full of cringe worthy material. Under thirty minutes, you get some truly creaky and corny moments, where one pun was so bad you can audibly hear an audience member groan. I speak as someone who really cut himself off from television as a constant stream, so there is an inherent interest in these genres now I do not have them as a continuous form. There is however with this a lot that is contrived and is terrible. The actual plot is that the first wife still looms over Strack, like a comedic version of Rebecca (1940) with a painting also involved, but large parts of this show is just a lot of unfunny puns which drag on relentlessly. It is a shame, as the one virtue is that Perkins is good.

He is an older man here and, sadly, it does not seem a surprise he would pass soon after this production in a couple of years, but he is dynamic in this role. It is one of the funnier aspects of the show that Strack is a really charming figure, actually a sweet person despite his morbid household, which Perkins taps into fully, barely batting an eye when his son plays the old trick of a pair of false legs hanging off the ceiling to scare his new sister into believing he has hung himself, or when his first wife reappears as a skeleton. And the premise could have still worked, only with the writing drastically improved upon. This did not get a release however. Instead of exterior shots, you get "Exterior house shot to follow", and there are not even end credits. The internet has thankfully made this available, even if as a preservation archive it and digital hard drives are not as wise to use as people may presume. Hence that, even if I thought this was a terrible piece of cheese at times, a perfect world would have had this as a restored DVD extra, and a better world would have made this even just last one season series with significantly better writing because the premise could have worked immensely.