Ruby (1977)

Piper Laurie hams it up as a southern belle haunted by her dead boyfriend in Ruby, a southern-fried possession flick that's more entertaining than it has any right to be. It also has a lot less possession than you'd guess from the ad campaign, which features 70s actress Janit Baldwin making some really creepy expressions, but happily it has plenty of other weird shit.

In the 1930s, gun moll Ruby Claire's lover Nicky was gunned down by her gangster boyfriend and the Dade County Gang down in the bayou in a neat opening scene that reminded me vaguely of Creepshow. As he sinks beneath the swamp, Nicky vows revenge and, simultaneously, Ruby goes into labor with his brat. Now, Nicky never knew that Ruby didn't set him up, which is an important plot point because he haunts her, but she sort of deserves it anyway.

Why? Well, she pretty much put the Dade County Gang to work in her drive-in movie theater where she's living in the 50s. She's living in decadent Southern Gothic luxury with her old man, the gang, and her mute daughter (played by Baldwin) and is played by Laurie as a sort of Southern Norma Desmond. We learn at some point that Ruby was once a movie actress and nightclub singer, but has since gone to seed. Unfortunately, not enough is made of this- it would have been cool to see more flashbacks to her old moll days or a drunken rant about the new drive-in movies. The 50 foot woman stayed big; it was the pictures that got small!

Anyway, the movie is basically a ghost story for the first two thirds. The mobsters all work at the drive-in and get killed off in creative ways by an invisible assailant. A highlight is the goon who gets shoved in the guts of a coke machine, which then delivers a cup of blood. In the third act, the film switches to a possession story with Baldwin acting a bit like Linda Blair and a bit like the horny dead mobster who wants to get back together with Ruby and, meanwhile, hoodlums keep dying and Laurie wanders around the drive-in lot drunk at night.

I know what you're going to ask and, yes, it's about as silly as it sounds, which is why I found it enjoyable. Making matters even more confusing, director Curtis Harrington got fucked on the ending of the film- his was more romantic, which makes sense because it is a movie about a woman who's in love with a ghost, so it makes the most sense for her to kill herself somehow. They replaced this with Piper Laurie getting drowned by a skeleton, which just looks cheesy as hell. Also, there's a whole other version of the flick going around with the TV edit, which had entirely new scenes shot and directed by Stephanie  that reportedly don't make a fuck of a lot of sense. I'd go with the VCI DVD (with commentary but without the later Kiss of the Tarantula double feature) and drink a few beers before watching because it's a loopy hoot.

Shock (1977)

A haunted house epic with a perverse domestic twist or two, Shock is perhaps middling Mario Bava, but it has some memorable images and maybe even a shock or two.

A couple and their son moves into a house that they probably should have avoided altogether. The wife Dora, played by Argento regular Daria Nicolodi, is understandably uneasy about moving back into the house, where her first husband, a junkie, killed himself, but her new husband Bruno, played by John Steiner also from all sorts of Italian flicks, insists on it- quite the sensitive husband there. (To round out the feeling that we're with the Italian exploitation repertory company, Ivan Rassimov shows up as a doctor.) Making matters worse for Dora, their son Marco is one of those little kids in movies who are easily amused by paranormal happenings in old houses, and he's at that difficult age where they're so susceptible to being possessed by their dead fathers.

What's fairly effective about the movie is that Bava keeps it unclear whether the kid is possessed, the father's ghost is haunting the joint, or they've just got a brat for a son. Marco resents his mother's relationship with Bruno and makes all sorts of difficulty, at one point telling his mother that he has to kill her. He may or may not have sent her flowers, allegedly from her dead husband. At one point, Marco pretends to hump her. Before long, things start moving around the house on their own and Dora is hallucinating rotting hands grabbing her. She starts slipping in her domestic duties, leading Bruno to remind her, "There's nothing worse for a marriage than sending a husband off without his coffee". Nothing? One would think being haunted by a vengeful junkie ghost would cause more problems.

The strength of these haunted house films is their atmosphere. Bava does a good job here with the sound design and striking visuals, such as a scene in which Nicolodi's hair goes every which way as she lies in bed and another in which Marco suddenly becomes the dead husband. Admittedly, as with most of these movies, there's only so many scenes you can take of people wandering around hallways and basements alone. Also, even after the plot reveals its dark secrets and explains why Bruno and Dora moved back into the house it doesn't really make sense. But, there are some good moments of fear and Bava and Nicolodi knew what they were doing by this point, so it all works out.