Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Taken in the context of the 1970's, "Shanks" reflects the distorted perceptions of the time. Castle mixes beauty with the macabre, innocence with violence, and poetry with symmetry. While the film accomplishes much , it does so for only limited amounts of time, but what the film fails to accomplish through the script, does more to reflect the time period in which it was made. The craziness and drug infested 60's, had now become the distorted 70's, and the vision of America had become perverted. Kinda like today with a freakish Federal Government, and the control freaks trying to run their own asylum.Castle succeeds on some levels, in his comparisons, but the film really moves slowly, especially without the use of much dialog.I really enjoy a Castle film, and have viewed this one , only once, and final time. I think Castle knew this would be his swan song, and tried to create something artful and deep, to silence his critics. It appears to have mixed results. The film is a work of art, but like most works, should be seen in a museum. If you can get past the premise of reanimating dead bodies with a few well placed electrodes, and enjoy a slow moving film, then this would be your cup of tea. I think William Castle was at his best when he simply made film to entertain, and thrill the audience. This film gets a 3 out of 10, simply for the fact that you cannot bore the audience, and there is too much wasted space between the action. The actors do a fine job, but , not enough to carry the film.

Malcolm Shanks is a deaf/mute street puppeteer who's enlisted by a aged scientist to assist in experiments to reanimate dead animals. When the mad scientist abruptly dies, Shanks carries out his work, using the dead doctor's own body... and before long, more bodies begin stacking up.Love it or hate it, "Shanks" is one of those films that leaves an indelible impression on everyone who's seen it. Sadly, that seems to be very few. This is not a mainstream movie by ANY stretch, but it certainly deserves to be better known than it is. I first caught the film on TV decades ago and, while I didn't clearly remember the specifics of the plot (of which there's very little) until I caught it on TV again last night, I vividly remembered the corpses skulking about the screen. There's something intensely and appropriately creepy about the actors' performances as the dead bodies.Although "Shanks" is artier than the usual William Castle fare, there's traces of the director all over the movie, from the camera-work to the humor to the makeup (the dead doctor looks uncannily like the blind woman from "House on Haunted Hill") to the hallucinatory sequence to the gimmicky silent-film cards (there's very little dialogue) to the director's cameo. Unfortunately, like most William Castle films, it loses steam as it nears its conclusion. The climax features a group of bikers who appear out of nowhere to threaten the titular hero. I love a bad biker flick, but it was an element that felt wholly out of place in this film. Further marring the movie, the final minute or two felt like an insult to the previous 90 minutes of surreal grotesqueness.Still, despite the shortcomings of the finale, the performers are incredible to watch, the production design is beautiful, the use of sound and music is superb and it's nice to see Castle was still making unique films right up to the end of his career. If only Paramount would give this never-available curio a widescreen DVD release, I'd be a happy camper.

This must surely be one of the most neglected fantasy films of all time. By all accounts a flop at the time of it's release, it has become the hardest to see of all William Castle's movies. It's also in colour, which is another rarity from this director. French mime/actor Marcel Marceau plays the title role of Malcolm Shanks, a deaf mute puppeteer who scratches out a living putting on shows for children, while bearing the brunt of a miserable home life with his money grabbing brother and sister-in-law, who take all the money he earns for themselves. One day, an elderly professor (also played by Marceau in a dual role) sees his puppet show and offers Shanks a job - to come to his home to assist him is some experiments involving the artificial stimulation of dead animals via electricity, or something...why or how it actually works is not expanded on, but it involves small implants being attached to the muscles and these are then activated by means of a small control box.Due to his background with puppets, Shanks proves to be very adept at controlling the movement of his first animals (a dead frog, and later a rooster). However things take an unexpected turn when he turns up for work one day only to find the professor dead in his armchair, seemingly from natural causes. Shanks has all but been hounded out of his own home by his cruel relatives, and he realises that desperate measures are needed to avoid going back there...and so the professor becomes the first human subject for re-animation.What follows is the beginning of a macabre and dreamlike fantasy. The "awakening" of the dead professor is one of the most ghoulish things I have ever seen. Marceau is famous as a physical performer, and his depiction of a dead body being artificially roused into movement is very skillful. With a shock of white hair, sunken face and glazed white eyeballs, the professor's body jerks up off the ground and begins to wobble around the laboratory, as Shanks perfects his manipulation of the control box. It isn't long before he feels confident enough to take his new puppet on a stroll into the streets outside, and this is the start of an escalation of events that you really need to watch to get the full enjoyment out of.This is almost a silent movie for much of it's running time, with long scenes involving no dialogue whatsoever, but the film is so effective in holding your attention that you will barely even notice the fact that nobody is talking. Shanks himself never speaks at all, but the support character all talk naturally when required - except for when they are dead of course! And some rather charming silent movie-style subtitle boards on the screen fill in any required exposition. The acting in this film is amazing, I suspect that Marceau is not the only performer to have a background in mime or theatre, as when he has to animate other dead characters, the movements are always effectively creepy.If I have any criticism, it would be that Castle - as he has often done before - stays shy of making the film as truly horrific as it could have been. He never exploits the "yuk" factor of the dead bodies, and there is no allusion to bloodshed or decomposition at any time. William Castle is an oddity among horror directors in that he always puts on the brakes before his subject matter goes to deep into unpleasant territory, whereas others would gleefully revel in the more gruesome aspects of a story like this, Castle seems to prefer to keep things suitable for family viewing! Plus, the movie even ends with a tacked on "it's only make-believe" epilogue that completely squashes the very dark ending of the real story...it's something he has done before, and it seems a shame that the films of William Castle are often sabotaged from being truly horror by the directors very own sensibilities.That notwithstanding, I would call "Shanks" a success, as it holds your attention constantly throughout. If any one thinks Marcel Marceau's talents end with a white made-up face and leotard, they should see him in this...he is perfect for the part, effective in bringing his whole character to life without speaking a single word. The film is a true oddity, but almost impossible to classify. Ultimately, it's just a unique and bewildering experience, and I think everyone should see it.

Here is a film I had wanted to see for some time and finally tracked down a low-quality bootleg video of. I am quite a fan of unusual films like this, although unlike the works of David Lynch or Alejandro Jodorowsky, the weirdness of this film comes naturally from the storyline and not from any intentional strangeness just for the sake of strangeness. William Castle has created a neat, compact, self-contained movie universe here, with the setting being an odd juxtaposition between a dark Gothic castle and sunny Northern California. I couldn't help but be reminded of Tim Burton's "Edward Scissorhands", another modern fairy tale about a mad but gentle genius and his near-mute misfit assistant in a dark old castle surrounded by a sunny '50s style suburbia. In fact, call me crazy, but I will bet that Burton has seen this film before and was possibly inspired by it while making his own film. There are other similarities to that film: the genius dies leaving the misfit to fend for himself in the outside world, the villains are in a motorcycle gang, the misfit falls for a local blond teenage girl, and he also performs his "magic" for children in a school classroom. Also like the films of Burton, there is a mixture of visual motifs from the past and present, including silent-movie style story-cards, Alex North's heady music score, and a motorcycle gang. Sadly missing, though, is a highly compelling storyline, but in this case style over substance is not such a bad thing. This film is hard to classify, as it is not completely horror, modern fairy tale, or art film. I think it would be best to classify it as an experimental curio - one of those films like "Eraserhead", Jacques Tati's "Playtime", "Cabinet of Dr. Caligaryi", or "El Topo", which have no conventional film equivalent yet continue to garner a following from a small group of adventurous filmgoers. If you are attracted to films such as these, you will not be disappointed with "Shanks."