High Spirits turned out to be a pretty good comedy. Peter Plunkett (Peter O'Toole), and his gang of merry Irishmen are facing foreclosure on their grand castle resort. The old fashioned castle needs a clever advertising gimmick to entice visitors. After talking with his looney, but sincere old mother who always claims that she talks to his dead father and the rest of the poor spirits looming around the dark castle, Plunkett decides that the castle ought to be haunted. And so, the guests are invited to stay among the spirits of the Plunkett family. Of course, Plunkett doesn't believe in the existence of ghosts, especially when he hasn't seen any for himself, despite his mother's attempts to convince him that they're everywhere. No, Plunkett's plan involves a few crappy props and some cheap scare tactics to thrill their small group of American guests.
But Plunkett and the gang (nor their furious guests) would ever have imagined real ghosts showing up. And this is where the movie really starts to get funny because everyone, after their various confrontations with the undead and all the strange things that start to happen in the castle, start to become so neurotic as they try to figure out what's going on.
The movie is a romantic comedy, of course, though it could've worked simply as a story of the funny occurences in the haunted castle as Plunkett and his frantic guests scurry about trying to deal with the situation any way that they can. Guttenberg is Jack, a sorry guy who's married to a real dull lady (Beverly D'Angelo) that really can't stand to know him, especially when he drags her out to some stupid castle. Jack actually starts to fall in love with one of the ghosts, a Plunkett ancestry named Mary (Daryl Hannah), a sickley looking young girl who died by the knife of her husband (Liam Neesom). The ghosts keep playing out the murder over and over again, and Jack, accidently intervening in one of the reenactments, somehow frees Mary from the murder. And so, now she's in love with Jack. But how does a ghost and a human end up together (and they have to end up together...after all it's a Hollywood love story)? Well, that's why you have to watch the movie.
Everyone in the movie is fantastic because, though some may start out to be quite annoying (such as the self-declared "professional parasychologist" or the cynical Sharon (D'Angelo)), they eventually come to be very entertaining as the movie goes along. I especially like the goofy interaction between Meg Tilly as the nympho and Peter Gallagher as the soon-to-be Priest. Peter O'Toole is wonderful. He is also the last to realize what the heck is going on.
It's definitely a comedy worth watching.
