Ghost Story (1981)

According to Wikipida Ghost Story was the 34th highest grossing film at the U.S. box office in 1981. There is something funny about that number, 34th place, it's not bad when you consider hundreds or thousands of movies come out a year, but is it really good, seems kind of middling. Based on a novel by genera writer Peter Straub, the film comes across as a kind of mediocre, imitation Steven King plot, due both to the type of story it is as well as its New England setting, in this case Vermont instead of Maine. The story concerns a group of friends who as youths accidently cause the death of a young woman (Alice Krige) and fifty years later her ghost comes back to seek its revenge. The movie is chiefly notably as containing the last feature film appearances for three big name, old school Hollywood actors, Fred Astaire, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Melvyn Douglas, the latter passing away four and a half months before the film was even released. Unfortunately I could never work up actually caring about these characters, and the film was so predictable, cliché, and drawn out that I just couldn't like it. It also has a lot more nudity then I expected. It's not that the film was so much bad, as just aggressively mediocre, which got under my skin more then a little bit. So *.