Ruby is a low budget film on the same level as something like "Mansion of the Doomed" or "The Hills Have Eye's". It isn't horrible but we're not talking Oscar material here either. It is a low budget horror film.Piper Laurie and Stuart Whitman had to have known what they were getting into. Their acting is very good but they have nothing to work with. The dialogue isn't good, the direction is terrible and you can tell the editor struggled to make the film work. He didn't have much to get creative with.What is annoying about the film is the direction. The film shifts abruptly from scene to scene, the acting from the secondary actors is, well, secondary. It's amateur time. The film is NOT scary. It has a few scenes here and there that could possibly be called haunting but the entire thing is just so low budget and makes no sense so you cannot become involved. All I could think of is 'thank God this is only 88 minutes" and then we get to the end. The worst scene of all. Laughably bad! Never want to sit through this again.

Raw and gritty horror/exploitation movies from the glorious '70s decade simply can't start any better than "Ruby" does… With a fuzzy and soundless flashback, set in the mid-1930s, and witness the promenade of two young lovers in a Florida swamp area. Suddenly a car drives up and the four passengers that come out relentlessly execute the boy, Nicky, who apparently was an over-ambitious mobster. Now that's what I call an opener, and it even gets better, as we fast-forward to the year 1951 at a typical drive-in theater where a projectionist guy in his cabin inexplicably gets killed by his own film reel! Great stuff, but then of course the script has some explaining and character drawings to do, and the whole thing quickly crumbles apart like a cookie! It turns out that the murdered mobster's girlfriend Ruby now runs a drive-in and actually employs the retired assailants. Apparently Nicky extracts his vengeance from beyond the grave and to obtain this he also possesses the mind and body of their now 16-year- old daughter Leslie that he never saw getting born. So basically what we have here is a miscellany of gangster movie with revenge-flick and spiritual possession elements, and all this is served to us by an over-the-top bizarrely behaving Piper Laurie who was clearly asked to come across as unnerving as she did in last year's box office hit "Carrie"! I will gladly admit that I personally stopped paying attention to the incoherence and numerous holes in the script, and simply tried to enjoy the crazy murder sequences and wonderfully trashy atmosphere and scenery as much as I possibly could. Quite frankly I can't explain why little Leslie walks around like a spider just as Linda Blair did in "The Exorcist", or what exactly is the added value of Roger Davis' character, or even whether or not it gets revealed that Ruby did betray her lover all those years ago. Fact remains, however, that "Ruby" contains a handful of awesome moments that are simultaneously odd, cheesy and disturbing! Mobster bodies' are being tossed around and smashed against trees, the flamboyant Ruby spies on her drive-in employees through a telescope whilst being drunk and one poor sucker even ends up hacked up in a soda vending machine. Perhaps director Curtis Harrington ("Queen of Blood", "Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?") and his crew could have done even more with the smart drive-in setting, but they already include a couple of atmospheric moments, like for example when Ruby finds herself all alone in the middle of the drive-in parking and haunted by her murdered lover's voice coming out of all the separate speakers. In conclusion, "Ruby" most certainly isn't a good movie if you analyze or review it thoroughly, but it contains multiple strong moments and memorable details to make it a must-see for admirers of 70s horror cinema (drive-in classics and otherwise)

I saw this one in the theater when it first came out and any film with Piper Laurie and Stuart Whitman holds promise for me. The dead-gangster-coming-back-to-avenge-his-murder premise could have worked, but the cheesy, B-movie script, the direction and several unfortunate sequences drag it down. Laurie and Whitman give the film its best moments but the rest of the cast is less than stellar and the minute Ruby's mute daughter starts "talking" in the dead gangster's voice we know this picture is in trouble. The low point comes when the hapless daughter is forced to do a ridiculous and incompetent take-off on Linda Blair's levitating and similar antics from "The Exorcist" - what can I say? I love good horror shows and hoped this would be one of them. There are chilling moments at the beginning and the very end, but the campy script and amateur supporting players sink this effort - too bad.

RUBY is a bizarre amalgamation of incongruous elements taken from different genres that just doesn't work as a whole once they're put together. I haven't seen such a kookily conceived horror film since THE BOOGEYMAN. But unlike that Uli Lommel flick, which actually works in an odd kinda of way, RUBY's disparate elements are totally impossible to mix together to create a satisfying product. Take one part Film Noir flick, one part THE EXORCIST, one part CARRIE and one part DRIVE-IN exploitation flick and what you get is something that's just plain silly. The direction is very old fashioned, which would have worked in the 1960s but not in the gritty 1970s, when the film was released. And why is the title of the film called RUBY, when it should have been LESLIE? What does Ruby the character have anything to do with the horror in the story? If a movie can't get its title right, what hope is there for the rest of the film? RUBY is more of a showcase for Piper Laurie, who's good but for what? Singing (but is that what we're looking for in a horror film)? Or dressing up in vintage clothes (again, the same question...)? Or spouting inane "film noir" dialogue? While watching it, I couldn't help but feel that the production was highjacked by producers (like THE REDEEMER) and the whole thing was altered in order to capitalize on the success of CARRIE and THE EXORCIST, and other horror movies of that period. The end result is embarrassing.