Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

Dorathen Better Late Then Never

Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Bonehead-XL Few filmmakers understand the absurd's potential for horror: The German Expressionists, Luis Buniel, Roman Polanski, David Lynch, maybe a few others. Of that number, I'd never think to include William Castle. Though Castle's gimmick films weren't without effective shocks, most were content to be charmingly campy. His final feature, "Shanks," saw the filmmaker moving into new creative territory, creating a film that mines the absurd to uncanny, dream-like, humorous, and unnerving affect."Shanks" does have a gimmick, of course. It's the only starring role of Marcel Marceau, world-famous mime. Large portions of the film lack dialogue and silent movie-style intertitles are inserted throughout. The plot revolves around Malcolm Shanks, a deaf-mute puppeteer. His only friends are the neighborhood children and, at night, Shanks suffers abuse at the hands of his cruel sister and her alcoholic husband. When an elderly mad scientist, also played by Marceau, takes notices of the boy's puppetry skills, he hires him as a lab assistant. Inside of his sprawling Gothic manor, the scientist has been experimenting with animating dead corpses through diodes and remotes. After the scientist dies, Shanks continues his work, creating twitching, stiff corpse puppets for revenge and amusement."Shanks" features some truly unforgettable imagery, much of it deeply creepy. Marceau's double role allows him to employ his mime skills as the creaking mad scientist meat puppet. The moment when the scientist is first revived has Marceau slowly, stiffly moving through the house, Shanks learning the ins-and-outs of the puppetry. A slow-motion attack by an undead rooster, featured in close-shots and quick cuts, should be absurd but Castle's direction creates a truly unnerving effect. Once the sister and husband are killed and revived, the movie truly begins to use its gimmick fantastically. The corpse-puppets robotically moving while shopping at a convenience store is both surreal and absurdly funny, especially the image of the two bending their bodies in half to step down a curb. Though I wish Marceau could have done more mime work himself in the film, Tsilla Chelton and Philippe Clay are both excellent in the roles. They lean in the wind, gyrate on the ground, stiffly move about, and perform bizarre, contorting dances.The film takes a hard left turn in the last act. Shanks' closest friend is the young girl Celia. It's clear she has a crush on him and the film is ambiguous over whether the adult man shares the girl's affection. At first she is frightened by Shanks' new puppets but quickly learns to love them, especially once he gets them to stand up and dance. While having a birthday party in the scientist's dusty, creepy mansion, a group of cartoonishly evil bikers suddenly ride into the film. They invade the house, rape the girl, tie up Shanks, and steal the puppets. The film signals the story shift by having one of the intertitles go up in literal flames. The conflict is created for the purpose of the climax, in which Shanks revives his first people. The cliché of a corpse digging its way out of a grave is repurposed in a fresh, spooky, uncanny way. The last half features the most impressive mime work, even Marceau's sudden transformation into an action hero comes out of nowhere. The sepia-toned penultimate scene is poetic and bizarre, while the final scene suggests the whole film might have been a dream. That would certainly fit the surreal tone.Alex North's vibrant score propels the film and was rightfully nominated for an Academy Award. Unseen for many years, "Shanks" was recently released on Blu-Ray by Olive Films. Olive is slowly trying to win my heart by releasing oddball obscurity like this and "The Hellstrom Chronicles." However, if they truly want to be the Criterion of cult films, they'll have to work a little harder then this. The image transfer is sometimes lovely but too often scratchy and dusty. Worse yet, there's nary a special feature on the disk, not even a trailer. Still, "Shanks" warrants rediscovery. It's bound to be the only horror film you see about mime, at the very least.

Michael_Elliott Shanks (1974) *** (out of 4) Leave it to William Castle, the ultimate trick master, to save his strangest film for last but that's pretty much what he's done with SHANKS. In the film, Marcel Marceau plays a deaf puppet master who takes over for his scientist friend in a bizarre experiment that allows one to control the dead like you would a puppet. Soon the once abused man becomes in control of everything he's ever wanted. This is a pretty bizarre little movie and I can't imagine it being a big disaster when originally released because it's doubtful too many horror fans wanted to see a horror movie without any violence, blood, spooks or anything like that. Instead of going for cheap thrills, Castle has instead pretty much created a film that is all atmosphere and there's so little dialogue that one could nearly call this a silent film. We even get title cards to explain some of the action so it's extremely close to being a silent. Castle's direction handles the material incredibly well and I'd probably argue that this is perhaps his best made movie. There aren't any gimmicks or tricks being thrown out and instead Castle appears to be wanting to prove to critics that he was able of creating a movie without them. The atmosphere of the film is incredibly thick as it really does seem like you're watching something that doesn't take place on Earth or set during any particular time period. Famous mime Marceau is excellent in his role and really delivers a remarkable performance. His turn at playing this mute is without question one of the best I've seen from any actor as he doesn't have one false step and there's never a single second where it seems like we're just seeing an actor play a deaf man. Tsilla Chelton and Philippe Clay are also excellent especially when they're the "puppets" as it was quite amazing to watch them do their thing. The cute Cindy Eilbacher is the perfect mix to be a friend to Marceau. This isn't a very well known movie, which is a shame but part of this might be due to the fact that it has yet to ever get an official release. Hopefully one day it will get a wider release and people will give the film a second shot because it certainly deserves it and I can't help but think had it been made somewhere between the 40s and the 60s then it would be looked at as a minor classic. Being lost in the 70s, the film is in major need of rediscovery.

MARIO GAUCI Producer-director William Castle may have too often been dismissed in critical circles as a Grade Z Hitchcock or for having been little more than a gimmick-laden showman during his peak years, but nobody could have sensibly predicted that he would eventually be saving his greatest trick for last; in fact, SHANKS was Castle's directorial swan-song and it might well be his best film as well! The artform of the mime is one that, understandably perhaps, hasn't been treated much on the silver screen (in this way, it elicits comparison with the classic ballet-oriented THE RED SHOES [1948] – which, similarly, adopted a stylized look throughout mixed with an adroit sense of the macabre); the most famous example is, of course, Jean-Louis Barrault's unforgettable Baptiste in Marcel Carne's LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS (1945) and Marcel Marceau (who has died fairly recently) can be said to be the only mime artist that is renowned worldwide. Consequently, it comes as little surprise to see him feature in a couple of cult movies over the years – Roger Vadim's BARBARELLA (1968) and Mel Brooks' all-star comedy SILENT MOVIE (1976), where his presence extended to just a cameo in which, ironically, he utters the only word of dialogue in the whole movie! SHANKS is another thing entirely: Marceau not only has a dual role and does the choreography but, for the most part, is virtually the whole show. As on-screen support, he has three talented actors – Tsilla Chelton and Philippe Clay (who are very adept at miming themselves) – and the young Cindy Eilbacher. The film was produced by Steven North, son of composer Alex who received another Oscar nomination (his twelfth) for his brilliantly inventive score – by turns playful, poignant and brooding – which, in a film like this, with very little dialogue and the intermittent use of intertitles, is as important as the on-screen characters themselves. Castle (who even has an amusing, unbilled cameo as a storekeeper) also employed other renowned Hollywood veterans behind the camera here, namely cinematographer Joseph Biroc (their third collaboration) and production designer Boris Leven.The film itself has rightly been described as one of the strangest ever made (the subtitle "A Grim Fairy Tale" is most apt!): it deals with a deaf-mute puppeteer (Marceau, naturally) who, abused by his harridan sister and her boozing partner, takes comfort in his friendship with a little girl he meets at the fair and an eccentric dying scientist (also Marceau, made up to look almost Caligari-like) who experiments with reanimating dead bodies (most notably a frog) via two portable electronic devices. After the scientist dies and is buried, the puppeteer takes possession of the re-animating devices himself and, inevitably, they come in handy when his relatives die (one he kills himself in self-defense at the scientist's mansion with the help of a re-animated rooster and the other – when beside herself at Marceau's lateness – is mowed down by a speeding car outside their house in the middle of the night!); he takes them shopping and has them wait on him and perform tricks when he invites the girl to the doctor's mansion! Their idyllic tryst is short-lived, however, when a gang of bikers burst in on them to treat a wounded member of their party… Watching SHANKS (which is the puppeteer's surname, by the way) right after Robert Hartford-Davis' CORRUPTION (1968), I couldn't help but be reminded of that film's analogous last segment (right down to the 'dreamy' coda); here, however, Castle has a trump card up his sleeve when a biker steals one of the doctor's electronic devices and fools around with the zombified 'servants' – the puppeteer, on the other hand, re-animates the scientist who, together with the servants now back in his control, beat up the gang. The narrative seems simple enough on paper, but the film is very much a unique experience (albeit an acquired taste, given the occasional longueurs brought on by its deliberate pace) – amusing, surreal, weird and disturbing. Certainly among the highlights is the puppeteer's re-animation of the scientist – whose movements made me think of a Jekyll/Hyde transformation as performed by Jimmy Cagney!! Unfortunately, the print quality left much to be desired: it seemed like a tenth-generation VHS copy, with the detail all soft and fuzzy and the picture excessively dark to boot; being a Paramount film, one hopes that Legend Films – or, better still, Criterion – will eventually get the opportunity to give this bizarre gem a decent release and, consequently, the exposure it greatly deserves…since Paramount themselves seem unwilling to do anything with it!

Earl Roesel (Sanguinaire) And that's not an exaggeration. I searched for this movie for a long time, and I'm glad I found it. Marcel Marceau plays Shanks, a deaf puppet maker, and Walker, an old scientist who has discovered the secret of reanimating the dead. He plays both beautifully, using his pantomime skills to achieve silent movie style acting. In fact, that's what this movie reminds me of - a silent fairy tale (the use of title cards to introduce scenes further suggests this), with a little George Romero thrown in! It's incredible that something this abstract and individualistic was made; I wish more movies would be as bold. The opening credits sequence, with tinted photos of kids watching Shanks' puppet show while the weird Oscar nominated (!) music plays is incredibly strange, memorable, and disturbing.William Castle, of all people, directed. This movie shows, more than any other, that he was more than just the "King of Gimmicks". To see such an expressionistic and disturbing vision.......is to regret that this was his final film as director.