Tormented
(1960)
The cover art has this tagline: "Tormented...by the she-ghost of Haunted Island!" You should imagine that all in caps
of course and that there was a picture of a dude being menaced by some scary-looking banshee-type broad. Even though I was sure none of this had anything to do with the movie, I immediately begin to think about how neat a place called Haunted Island
would be and how scary being bothered by a "she-ghost" undoubtedly was and before I knew it, I was sitting down in front of this one, wondering why I had put off watching it for the last eighteen months. Things start out promisingly enough, with
stud jazz pianist Tom Stewart trying to break up with some tart in a dress that was so tight, she's still trying to get out of it. I was trying to overlook the fact that they also started off the film with Tom Stewart doing some narrating about how he
likes this island he lives on because it's a really sweet place to live or kill mistresses or something. Characters in these low budget snoozers are usually vapid enough boobs that I don't want to hear them speak, let alone listen in on their inner
most thoughts. Tom (inertly played by Richard Carlson of Creature From The Black Lagoon and It Came From Outer Space fame) is trying to tell Vi that even with that
curve-hugging dress that it's over and that he is going to marry his other sweetheart Meg, mainly because she's prettier and her daddy is stinking rich. Vi pulls the old "well I guess I'll just have to publish my little book I've been working on called
Tom Stewart's Love Letters to His Skanky Hooch Vi". She also tries to threaten Tom with giving the letters to her lawyer for a lawsuit. And if she's alleging that he's a stud jazz pianist, then he's guilty as hell! Tom's not too keen on
having his studliness put on trial though and the next thing I know, this dumb broad manages to have her ample caboose break through the railing at the top of the lighthouse and is hanging there above the rocky surf with one hand, pleading with Tom to
help her. This is one of those ethical dilemmas that you might come across during a game of Scruples: "Your mistress has threatened to expose you as the horny cad you are and then she dangles from a lighthouse awaiting certain death if she falls. You
can save her easily, but if you don't, no one will know and you'll be free to marry that rich blonde on the other side of the island. Do you save her?" While Tom stands around pondering this situation, Vi falls to her death, but I'm sure he felt bad
about it. The next morning, Tom is scanning the ocean with his binoculars when he sees a body floating. Uh-oh! Looks like that she-ghost is already doublecrossing him and is going to be floating up on shore, probably with a big note pinned to her
reading "Tom Stewart is hung like a silverfish!" Tom realizes all this and dives in (making up your mind the morning after your mistress died is so much easier) and hauls the body to shore only to discover that it was just a bunch of seaweed and
that his walnut-sized brain was playing tricks on him!  About this time we meet Sandy. She's Tom's fiancee's eight-year old daughter and is played by the daughter of the
director. She's not as bad as you would expect the daughter of the director to be (see Sofia Coppola for example), but I'm supposed to be seeing some dang she-ghost terrorizing this bum all over Haunted Island! Most of the movie Sandy just kind of
hangs around getting on the increasingly insane Tom's nerves, but how many of us could really put up with some dumb kid trying to show us some lame magic trick, while we keep hearing our name being called by our dead girlfriend?
Tom sits around his
island bungalow trying to practice his piano playing, but stuff keeps happening to interrupt him. Stuff like some record being mysteriously played, even after he's taken the LP, whatever that is, off of the record player. I imagine it's just a
coincidence that the record is that kicking new tune called "Tormented" by that break-out artist, Vi. Memo to cheating guys: Even if your dead mistress doesn't turn into a she-ghost and even if you don't live on a place called Haunted Island, go ahead
and throw out the records recorded by her. It's just good manners. Whenever his girlfriend drops by (the one that's rich, not a she-ghost) she wonders what's bothering him and he tries to drum up some cheap sympathy by saying stuff like "I'm just
worried that I'm not good enough for that Carnegie Hall thing next month." Go ahead and stop worrying, you aren't good enough. Can someone fire up the she-ghost so he'll quit tormenting those ivories? For no real reason, we're introduced to the
blind real estate agent who doesn't seem to do anything on the island but bring people flowers. Tom asks her stupid stuff like, "do you believe in she-ghosts" and "if a guy was being haunted by a she-ghost and he didn't want his rich fiancee to find
out that he'd been cheating with the she-ghost, what should this guy do?" Mrs. Ellis tells him that even though she really don't believe in she-ghosts and stuff like that, she sees a lot of strange things in her biz. Then she tells some vaguely
supernatural tale about a boy and his dog that turned into she-ghosts or something and left seaweed laying around the house and peed on people's couches or something. The best part of her being blind is that Tom could roll his eyes, pretend to sleep,
and flip her the bird while she bored him and us to tears and she would never know! She leaves and Tom gets haunted some more. He loses the wedding ring and thinks he sees it on Vi's disembodied hand, but Sandy who has shown up says that she doesn't
see nothing. Tom tries to get Meg to elope so he can get off the island, but she says no, so he says he just might go elope by himself. I know that as you're reading this, you're wondering how much more exciting can things get. This she-ghost really
seems to be all over this Stewart character and Haunted Island is really sounding like a fearsome place, but does the movie have anything else up its sleeve?  How does a boat
captain who ferried Vi over to the island (she managed to mention the name of her secret boyfriend to him) and is owed five bucks by her sound? Tom is new to this whole "covering up suspicious disappearance of mistress" thing, so when the sea captain
comes by looking for Vi because she owes him five bucks, Tom grudgingly pays him and thinks that's that. Naturally, the sea captain puts together the fact that no one ever saw Vi leave the island and that Tom is getting hitched to some rich gal who
isn't Vi and he realizes that the five bucks he got can be re-negotiated into $5000!
The sea captain gets cool points because he constantly refers to Tom as "Dad" but Tom gets cool points because he takes the sea captain up to the lighthouse and is
convinced by the she-ghost to whack him on his melon with a lead pipe. With that bit of business finished, he can finally get ready for his wedding. After he leaves with the body, we see a little nosey brat by the name of Sandy come walking down the
stairs all sad and stuff. Tom went and murdered a guy and didn't even tell her! And she thought they were best friends! If you've been thinking that up until now, the she-ghost hasn't exactly been pulling out all the stops in terrorizing Tom (I
don't count using peer pressure to get him to thump the blackmailer) then you've got to see her when she causes Meg's wedding dress to be ruined because there's seaweed on it! Or the big finish, when at the wedding she causes all the flowers to wilt
and blows the pages of the Bible the priest was holding to the page about burial instead of weddings! She's an absolute fiend! (Within her white-trash-level budget of course.)  Tom and Sandy hook up at the lighthouse (the wedding having been cancelled due to dead flowers and a stiff breeze) and they have their little talk about him killing Vi and he tells her that maybe they should go up to the top of the
lighthouse so that she can get a better look at the rocky surf hundreds of feet below. Next thing you know, Tom takes a header and it isn't long before they're hauling him and Vi out of the water and she's wearing the wedding ring that was intended for
Meg! That thieving she-ghost!
Director Bert I. Gordon (BIG to his homies) shoots this in about the most bland way you can imagine, using the same ugly establishing shot of a beach house about ten times during the movie. Sometimes it looks like
night, sometimes it looks like sunset and sometimes it looks like it was cloudy, but BIG was hoping it would pass for night - all in the same scene! The effects used to depict the hauntings make you long for William Castle's tricks, especially when
Richard Carlson is forced to hold a mannequin's head and act scared of it. I'm sure we all remember BIG from Attack Of The Puppet People and are still trying to forget him from Empire Of The Ants, but even the ant movie had Joan Collins battling giant bugs. Tormented has nothing going for it. It looks cheap, it's shot artlessly, Tom is an unsympathetic moron, and the movie can't even decide
if the she-ghost was just a product of his imagination (everyone saw her handiwork at the wedding, but no one saw anything else she did). If it wasn't his imagination, then he really wasn't driven insane by his guilty conscience, which renders the
whole concept (at least what I thought was the concept) of the movie void. This is one BIG movie that's a BIG glop of smelly seaweed on your Sunday finest. Skip it. (I know, I know, you only bought the disk to watch Lady Frankenstein anyway.)
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