Ghosts That Still Walk (1977)

Heads up. This is a terrible movie! Just in case you were going to be annoyed spending your valuable time reading the review. I know the ninety minutes that I spent watching wasn’t worth it. Then again at least I get to write a review and get some of the frustration out here.

Mark, a fifteen year old boy, is getting an MRI. He has been getting headaches, seizures, and generally feels lousy. He is all smiles and jokes until it starts. Then he freaks out which transitions to him talking to the doctor. Mark, along with his grandmother, is told that they can’t find anything wrong with him. The doctor suggests that it might be all of the recent tragedy in his life. His grandfather had a heart attack, and his mom went nuts and was locked up. So he sends him to see a psychiatrist named Dr. Stills.

Dr. Stills decides it is important to hypnotize both Mark and his grandmother. And she also wants to read Mark’s mothers’ journals as she was working on a book when she lost her marbles. This is an excuse for flashbacks, which is how most of Ghosts That Still Walk tells the story. We get to see Mark’s grandparents have a bad time in their RV. Then we see Mark’s mother had been messing with astral projection and an Indian mummy, finally there is a bit where Mark is possessed by the spirit of the mummy. So that is the ghost that still walks… around in Mark’s body. Some stuff happens and then the ghost is destroyed. The end.

In my years tracking down oddball regional drive-in movies I’ve seen a lot of trainwrecks. But in many of those there was still something to enjoy. Inept direction and/or acting can be entertaining so normally they are good for a few laughs. Though on occasion we get a movie that is so tedious that there is nothing redeeming about it. Ghosts That Still Walk falls directly into that category.

The star of the movie...

This movie is basically three shorts with a wrap around to connect them and even with only needed to setup and execute a cohesive plot for maybe thirty minutes at a time it fails. We get an extended RV driving in the desert bit with some rocks rolling at them while grandma is trying to cook supper in the kitchen. It goes on and on, stopping for them to eat before continuing. I’m not kidding. All of this is to setup that grandpa had a heart attack, which they already established in dialogue.

Then we see the mother starring at a mummy that is just laying there in her home office. She does some voiceovers that don’t explain much of anything. Then she sees Mark and the mummy sort of swap and then goes nuts never to be seen again. Finally, it comes to Mark being freaked out about the mummy in the house and having nightmares before screaming a lot. It all wraps up with him now in a wheelchair (I guess that happened) and on a picnic with grandma and Dr. Stills. She forces the Indian possessing him to come to terms with being dead and then it is all over.

Does that sound thrilling to you? Because it isn’t. These stories are filled with padding, in fact they are mostly padding. Nothing much happens other then the viewer losing ninety minutes of their lives. The performances are rough with awful line delivery that is barely audible with the subpar sound. Toss in some camerawork that has most scenes so dark that it is hard to see what is happening on the screen. I don’t have a positive thing that I can find to talk about so I’m just going to stop. Don’t watch Ghosts That Still Walk. Just don’t do it.

 

© Copyright 2023 John Shatzer