Jerboa Black’s review published on Letterboxd:
This is the movie Disney’s The Haunted Mansion wanted to be, but could never live up to. Ghosts are often looked at as scary, strange, and dangerous, but ghosts can be sad, and ghosts can be whimsical, and this film plays with those latter depictions of ghosts that aren’t used so often. For me the depiction is a breath of fresh air because Halloween IS whimsical. It’s about dangerous things, fear, paranoia, the unknown, but it is about celebrating those things, celebrating some of the other emotions- emotions that we don’t want to think about the rest of the year- that are the spice of life.
High Spirits is about two things. It’s about Peter Plunkett played by the man of La Mancha himself, Peter O’Tool, trying to raise enough money to prevent his family's historic castle (which is also a hotel) from being deported and becoming a Florida tourist attraction. He decides to do this by selling it as a haunted castle. The rest is about Steve Guttenberg and ghost sex. I am going to put my foot down and say that this is, without a doubt, the best movie about ghost sex ever made (come at me bro!).
At times this movie is hard to describe because one might say it is a fun feel good family film, but there is quite a bit in here that might not be for kids. I mean, did I mention that half the movie or more is about ghost sex?
This movie has a great mood to it. The castle, and the surrounding area, looks excellent. Comfortable is the word I’d use. There’s something very comfortable about this movie. Watching it is like putting on a pair of warm house shoes. There are also some great set pieces used throughout the entire film. The effects are a combination of practical and 2D animation. None of it seems off or poorly done, they all fit the film perfectly even if some effects are obviously outdated. It’s a bit of a bottle film, but because the effects and the set pieces are good and work so well here the movie does feel more epic than it is.
The acting is good, sometimes great. Peter O’Tool's character stands out because his acting seems too advance not for the movie, but for the character that he’s playing, and yet he gives a character that might have been forgettable a whole lot of personality in the way that he speaks, moves, and expresses himself. Several of the characters (and there are just enough of them) have their own miniature arc, and most of them have a memorable scene or two.
Not every joke in this movie works, but there are so many of them, and they are coming at you so quickly, and so many of them ARE genuinely funny that you can easily forgive the ones that aren’t. This has nothing to do with my critique, but Liam Neeson is in this movies. NEESONS, THO! And he is the horniest murder ghost. He does it with great charisma, and it’s done in such a way that it is humorous, but not offensive.
Just want to talk about the ghosts before ending things. They have ghosts that look perfectly human, and ghosts that look like corpses, ghosts that look like fairies, and ghosts that are horses. It blends together very well, and it may have even given a reason for the potential discrepancies between the different kinds of ghosts (but not all of them, and not what they are all capable of, but it’s not really that kind of film).
This movie made me quite happy to have watched it. It is an entertaining, funny, at times thrilling, story that is actually quite a bit more romantic than I’ve described here. I don’t know why this isn’t a classic. I don’t know why it has taken all this time for me to actually catch this film.