Ghost Story

I first encountered GHOST STORY on VHS in the late 1980s where it had been retitled in America as MADHOUSE MANSION to avoid confusion with the better known 1981 Fred Astaire GHOST STORY. Although the print wasn't great, I was immediately attracted to the story of three 1920s British school chums who get together for a weekend of hunting at a Victorian estate recently inherited by one of them. Shortly after their arrival, strange visions are seen by only one of the three. They involve the former inhabitants of the house and are linked to a porcelain doll that was left behind.

The three men are an interesting mix. The owner is a rich fop while another is a class conscious snob who is secretly there to ghost hunt having been told the place is haunted. The third is a fish out of water. He's a mild mannered, overly talkative, rather pathetic soul who is looked down upon by the other two. It is to him rather than the ghost seeker that the visions appear. They depict a brother and sister who lived there before. The brother has the sister committed to a local insane asylum in order to prevent him from acting on his "feelings" for her.

The cast is a curious one. Ken Russell regular Murray Melvin plays MacFayden, the owner of the estate. Cult actor Vivian MacKerrall (WITHNAIL & I) is the ghost seeker/hunter while the plum role of the schoolmate who is visited by the ghosts went to stage and TV actor Larry Dann. Singer Marianne Faithfull, still recovering from her longtime drug addiction but cast for her marquee value, is the unfortunate sister while Leigh Lawson plays her tormented brother. Hammer horror regular Barbara Shelley portrays the asylum matron and Anthony Bate is the asylum director.

Writer-director Stephen Weeks, who had earlier done I, MONSTER with Christopher Lee and GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT, shot the film in India on a Maharajah's estate that was built during the Victorian era. While this shaved production costs, it created a host of other problems with poor sanitary conditions impacting the health of the cast and crew. Once completed, the film was barely released and had to wait for the advent of home video in order to be discovered and appreciated. Several bonus features on this release chronicle the ups and downs of the production.

The Blu-Ray release is an all region affair and comes with a plethora of extras. These include a 72 minute documentary on the making of GHOST STORY, 7 early short films by Stephen Weeks, and the surviving 30 minutes of footage from THE BENGAL LANCERS. This was intended to be a major motion picture with Michael York, Trevor Howard, and Christopher Lee but after 10 days it was shut down because its financing collapsed due its backers participation in an elaborate insurance fraud scheme of which the filmmakers were unaware...For more reviews visit The Capsule Critic.

A singularly disjointed and eccentric Murray Melvin vehicle pulling in tropes, inspirations, and homages from left and right, delightful until the last second of the closing credits. Production and costume design are something else entirely-so many questions that yield no answer. I suppose people come in for Marianne Faithful but the film is so blatantly uninterested and unaware of women the leading lady looks more like an afterthought. I wonder if this is a TV movie or people actually went out to watch it in theatre at the time of its release, as the aesthetics, the campiness, and the narrative structure are more reminiscent of TV productions yet it is not marked as one. Very seventies and yet timeless.

With a title as vague and dull as "Ghost Story", your film must be pretty darn amazing and suspenseful to be memorable! Alas, this 1974 TV-production is weak altogether, and I guess that's why nobody has ever heard of it. The story, setting and atmosphere certainly hold a lot of potential, but the film is too talkative and slow-paced, with unlikable characters and too many plot-aspects that don't make any sense. Three former college mates gather at an old gothic and remote mansion that one of them inherited, supposedly for a reunion, but they clearly never were close friends. That already causes for a big dent in the plausibility. Through sleeping in a room with an eerie porcelain doll, Talbot - the nerdy one of the bunch - gets a spiritual connection with Sophy Kwykwer; a woman who used to live in the mansion. Sophy was emotionally tormented and eventually submitted to a mental asylum by her no-good husband. A handful of sequences, some involving the doll and some taking place at the uncanny asylum, are noteworthy, but "Ghost Story" isn't worth purchasing. The two most famous names in the cast, namely Marianne Faithfull and Barbara Shelley, hardly have any screen time. Before this film, I only knew Faithfull from her fantastic song "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan". The story and dramatic tone of this four-minute chant is already a lot more intense and impactful than this entire movie.

I totally disagree with the other comments I've read here.

I regard this as one of the best ghost stories I've seen. I love the atmosphere of it, the English gentlemen going to a luxurious country retreat, and the creepy feel of the place that the film conveys superbly.

The music used is highly effective too, especially the scenes where the doll appears.

The only scenes I wasn't that keen on were the ones shown in the lunatic asylum.

I loved the scenes filmed in the country house with the three friends, from the moment they arrived to the final scenes.

The 1920's music, and the McFadden character, {Murray Melvin} dancing to it, as he played a record, was a lovely touch that added to the enjoyment. It is the sort of house that I would love to visit for relaxation in beautiful surroundings, redolent of better times.

It has been many years since I had the pleasure of seeing it, and I long for a DVD release of this wonderfully filmed ghost story.

Pretty awful British mystery disguised as a horror film, Ghost Story pitches some poncey people into an old country house retreat and one of them starts to see spectral images that nobody else can. Directed by Stephen Weeks (I, Monster) and starring Anthony Bate, Larry Dann, Marianne Faithful, Sally Grace, Penelope Keith, Leigh Lawson and Vivian MacKerrell, what transpires for the 90 minute run time is utter boredom and bad writing.

There's too many unanswered questions hanging in the air throughout, the pace is straight out of the snail derby, and the musical score is wholly inappropriate. Faithful gives good value as a tortured soul, and Weeks shows a good turn of ingenuity for some atmospheric scenes in an Asylum, but other than that, this is a cure for insomnia and rightly it has vanished into relative obscurity. 3/10