Most movie comedians wind up in a haunted house sooner or later, and this was Martin and Lewis’ turn, a remake of The Ghost Breakers. Only it doesn’t quite work: Martin and Lewis weren’t that great at being scared. Martin was too smooth and confident, Lewis too anarchic and dumb – they wrecked havoc, rather than knocked knees.
They’re not helped by having an inadequate support cast – Lizabeth Scott looks too old and disinterested in men to be Martin’s love interest, and too tough to play the part of a scaredy-cat (the ever-sexy Dorothy Malone, who pops up at the beginning as a gangster’s girlfriend, would have been a far better choice); there’s no decent heavies either (unforgivable from a studio film even though Hal Wallis ran an independent outfit at Paramount). Carmen Miranda looks very old in her final film appearance (she died of a heart attack a few years after this was made) – although it does give Jerry an opportunity to imitate her in a night club act.
That’s another thing, the film is full of Martin and Lewis doing nightclub acts sort of plunked into the action (Norman Lear, one of their TV writers, is credited as working on the script). The majority of running time takes place on a boat rather than at the haunted house. There are some laughs, though – the two leads have plenty of energy and I enjoyed the spookiness at the end.
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