The final 10-minutes or so amounts to a neat wrinkle I didn't see coming. Too bad the rest of the ghost film is so utterly pedestrian. On the eve of his wedding to Meg (Sanders), Tom (Carlson) is confronted in a remote lighthouse by former lover, Vi (Reding). Unwilling to give up prospects of marrying into wealth, Tom allows Vi to fall into the ocean below, refusing to help as she dangles from the tower. Now he's haunted by her ghost, even as he continues his wedding plans.In my view, the material really needs a visual stylist to complement the spooky premise. As is, Director Gordon films in flat, high-key style thereby undercutting the eerie premise. Add a ghost who resembles Marilyn Monroe at her softest, and I was anything but repelled or even unsettled. Unfortunately, the occasional apparitions are about as scary as over-exposed film, which the effect likely is. If the writers were reaching for some kind of ghostly novelty, they got it, but at the movie's expense. Cast against type, a 50-year old wholesome Carlson fails to show much needed shadow of his own, and as a jazz musician and swain of a 20- year old cutie, he's a stretch. What the film does have is beguiling little 10-year old Susan Gordon (the director's daughter) as Meg's sister. She manages to steal the film in unobtrusive fashion unlike many Hollywood moppets. Also, catch Joe Turkel as the jive talking boat captain, apparently on loan from Kubrick and his iconic role in The Shining (1980). Otherwise, the 75-minutes amounts to an all-too-real bust, bombshell ghost or no.

Mediocre acting, melodramatic direction, and sometimes vacuous, uneven scripting make this noirish, wannabe chiller a treat to watch. If the screenplay were half as tight as the women's clothes--even those of a fat, middle-aged blind lady--this offering might have emerged as just another half-baked, predictable haunter. But the incongruous dialogue, lurid reactions, and clumsily presented ghostly manifestations (lopped-off heads and hands) make the film a non-stop feast of fun. Eleven-year-old Susan Gordon has the best lines and, unlike most of the cast, delivers them well. (She also has the best wardrobe, even if it does make her look years younger than her actual-age character.) The only dull moments are when Carlson is (obviously not really) playing the piano, and that just means more ectoplasm--and more merriment--is at hand (or head).

Uh-oh! Never cross a woman who's crazy enough to turn up days before you get married and flash those bunny boiling eyes at you. That's what happens to our protagonist here. Some jazz pianist on a small island, getting ready to marry his beau, tries to break off with his on the side lover, but she's having none of it. If she can't have him, no one can. At least that's what she keeps saying before she falls off the side of a lighthouse. That's not our hero's fault, is it? Fair enough, he could have saved her, but there you go.Guiltily trying to return to normal life, our hero finds himself almost immediately being stalked by a ghostly presence. Footprints appear in the sand. He sees her body floating in the sea, only to find out it's seaweed. Her watch appears. A record she sings on keeps appearing on his record player. Looks like his ex isn't even letting death from stopping her doing a bit of stalking.His girlfriend is flummoxed by his behaviour, as is her kid sister, who dotes on the guy. He's still determined to go through with the wedding when who turns up but Joe Turkel. He was the guy who brought the lover to the island, and quickly twigs that there's a doing a-transpiring. He also plays the character like a beatnik so expect loads of hip talk, dad.What I liked about this film (apart from the constant tormenting), was that instead of revealing about three quarters of the way through the film that it was all a hoax (as these films tend to do), it just goes for the straight ahead haunting and is all the better for it. There's loads of ghostly action here and it nips along with nary a dip in timing. I've not watched many of Bert I Gordon's films but I'll recommend this.

***SPOILERS*** Just when things were starting to go great for jazz pianist Tom Stewart,Richard Carlson, all of a sudden an old flame of his pooped into Tom's life. The sexy voluptuous and always gets what she want's Vi Mason, Juli Reding. Vi had gotten the news from the local society page in the newspaper that her ex-boyfriend Tom is going to be hooked up or married to sweet and pretty Meg Hubbard,Lugene Sanders, and the hurt and feeling rejected Vi don't like that one bit! Sneaking onto the off shore island where the wedding between Tom & Meg is to take place Vi threatens to expos Tom's affair, even though at the time he wasn't even married, in the hot & steamy love letters he sent her and thus put a damper on the happy couples wedding ceremony.While having it out with Tom at the island's lighthouse Vi slips and fall through the railing to her death on the rocks below. Now free and able to marry Meg and pursue his career as a top flight jazz pianist Tom's conscious starts to take control of him. Not that he had anything to do with Vi's death, it was an accident, but what Tom seems to think it's Vi's ghost vindictive who's hunting him throughout the entire film! Not only that his fiancée Meg's kid sister Sandy, Susan Gordon, as well as the island caretaker the blind Mrs, Ellis, Lillian Adams, soon discover Tom's secret in Vi's disappearance, her body was never found,and that drives him psycho! And later when the boat captain who ferried Vi to the island Nick, Joe Turkel, start putting the squeeze on and blackmailing him Tom goes homicidal.It takes a while for Tom to realized that it's only him and no one else who's seeing things in the late Vi's head an hand as well as jewelry popping up all over the place and driving him nuts. But when little Sandy catches him murdering Nick at the lighthouse he really goes off the wall. ***SPOILERS*** Fearing life in prison or even worse the death penalty or gas chamber Tom decides to do little Sandy in, who in fact loves her future brother in law, the same way he did, or accidentally did, Vi in. fortunately for everyone involved, except Tom, things don't turn out the way Tom planned them to. By the time the film is over Tom is finally reunited with Vi, just as she had planned from the world beyond, for all eternity.