The last film directed by the man who made movies and the hulabaloo around them into magic, William Castle, Shanks is also the first major film role for Marcel Marceau. So already you know that it's not going to be normal. At all.

Castle wanted to work with the mime after watching him perform "Youth, Maturity, Old Age and Death" and approached him with this script, which he said dealt with similar themes. Marceau would say that the script was exactly what he had been looking for.

Malcolm Shanks (Marceau) is a deaf and mute puppeteer who lives a horrible existence with his briue of a sister and her alcoholic husband. To deal with his tragic existence, he makes puppet shows about his few friends, like Celia, and enacts them for the people in his hometown.

His skills earn him a job with Old Walker (also Marceau),who brings him to his gothic mansion to be a lab assistant as he learns to control the dead as if they were, well, puppets. However, when Walker dies, his family is enraged that they've lost the money that Shanks was making and Barton smashes the puppet of Walker.

Soon, he's killed his brother-in-law by sending a reanimated chicken after him and forced his sister into traffic. They soon become his marionettes, who he uses to buy groceries and have ornate picnics for Celia, who is vaguely disturbed by the fact that her friend has killed two people and brought them back to some form of life.

Then, as happens in 1970s movies, a biker gang attacks and forces Shanks to make the puppets do things he'd never want them to do as one of their members assaults and kills Celia. The gang includes Don Calfa (the mortician from Return of the Living Dead),Larry Bishop (Wild in the Streets),Biff Manard (Hap from Trancers and Playgirl's 1975 Man of the Year) and Helena Kallianiotes (Kansas City Bomber).

After being forced to deal with the machinations of others so long, the puppeteer rises and decimates everyone in his path, bringing his love back to life for one more dance before awakening from his dream.

Shanks is a strange film that may not always work, but you have to admire the fact that it seems like Castle was trying to close out his career with as close to an art film as he would ever get.

Deaf-mute puppeteer, living with his despicable relatives, learns how to reanimate the dead from his employer; using the corpses of his step-sister and brother-in-law, he exacts revenge on a group of bikers who have crashed his castle. Ridiculous acting vehicle for mime extraordinaire Marcel Marceau, produced on the cheap in Vancouver and barely released by Paramount. Scare-master William Castle directs in a pedestrian, uncertain fashion--even the little bits and pieces that do come off well are eventually buried under the clumsy handling. A sequence where two corpses arise in unison in a country field has a small-scaled lunatic grandeur which might have been darkly comic under different circumstances; however, one doesn't know how to respond to the movie because it isn't directed toward any particular audience (it's too static and silly for adults, and too garish for kids). There's a strange romance in the film between Marceau (looking his age in a too-dark hairstyle borrowed from Tom Jones) and a teenage girl still wearing pigtails. Castle shows no finesse--it's as if he had never directed a picture before--while his cast appears understandably perplexed. The talented Helena Kallianiotes (playing a halter-top wearing biker chick in hoop earrings) stumbles about in a graveyard swilling vodka, sees a hand emerge from the earth, and stumbles away. Castle doesn't know how to make these incidents eerie and funny at the same time. With "Shanks", his final effort as director, he lost his touch. * from ****

Director William Castle was renowned for his cinematic gimmicks; in his final film, Shanks, the novelty was the casting of French mime Marcel Marceau in the lead. The fact that the star remains silent throughout speaks volumes about the film's quirkiness, and how much you enjoy it will depend on whether you appreciate abject eccentricity for the sake of it. Having developed a fondness for the absurd, I found the film to be an enjoyable and charming experience - like something that Tim Burton might have made during his early years as a film-maker.

With a silent star, it's only apt that Castle treats Shanks like a silent film, introducing chapters with title cards, using occasional sepia tones, and allowing his performers' physicality to be the focus of the movie. Marceau shines in two roles: as deaf-mute puppeteer Malcolm Shanks, and wealthy Old Walker, who hires Malcolm to help him in his scientific experiments at his mansion. Malcolm is only too happy to work for Walker, since it gets him away from his shrewish step-sister, Mrs. Barton (Tsilla Chelton),and her alcoholic husband (Philippe Clay),who are mean to him; besides, Old Walker's experiments in reviving dead animals via implanted electrodes gives Malcolm the opportunity to be paid for his unique set of skills, the puppeteer deftly controlling the movements of reanimated frogs and chickens with a special hand-set (a small black box with three dials).

When Malcolm arrives at work to find Old Walker has passed away during the night, he realises that he is out of a job, and so inserts the electrodes into the dead man's body, giving him the appearance of life. As the reanimated Old Walker, Marceau makes full use of his agility, moving awkwardly and robotically; the effect is both amusing and macabre.

Malcolm is interrupted by a drunken Mr. Barton, who turns up at the mansion, demanding money. The puppeteer seizes the chance to rid himself of this horrible man by controlling his reanimated chicken (not a euphemism); face bloodied from the bird's pecking and clawing, Barton tumbles down some stairs and dies. Malcom then reanimates Mr. Barton and, through a twist of fate, also does away with, and subsequently revives, his nasty step-sister. To keep up appearances, Malcolm takes the dead couple for a stroll through the town, where he meets his teenage friend Celia (Cindy Eilbacher),whom he takes for a picnic. When Celia suddenly realises that she is in the company of dead people, she is horrified, but Malcolm assures her that she is safe; having calmed the girl, he takes her to the mansion where he organises a party to celebrate her birthday.

The fun comes to an end, however, when the party is crashed by a gang of bikers, who attack Cindy and tie up the puppeteer. When Malcolm escapes, he finds Celia's lifeless body lying in the undergrowth and exacts revenge.

Described in the opening credits as a 'grim fairy tale', Shanks is precisely that, a bizarre fantasy laced with black humour that doesn't end happily ever after. At times, it feels like a movie aimed at children, until one remembers that it is dealing with the very unsavoury and disrespectful idea of treating the dead like puppets. While Malcolm's relationship with Celia, a good thirty years his junior, is seemingly intended as innocent, one can't help feeling a little uneasy about such a creepy old guy hanging out with a pretty blonde girl in pigtails. And the ending, in which Malcolm brings Celia back to life so that he can dance with her only adds to the unsettling vibe, at least until the whole thing is revealed to have been a story being told by the puppeteer (dressed unnervingly like the child catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) to an eager audience of kids.

6.5/10, rounded up to 7 for the ghoulish moment when dead Mrs. Barton accidentally severs her own finger while cutting Celia's birthday cake, and for reanimated Mr. And Mrs. Barton doing a Charleston-style dance.