In contrast to the words of Ray Parker Jr., Sherman Hemsley is totally ’fraid of ghosts in Ghost Fever. And, apparently, laughs. If Hemsley was attempting to move on up to a movie career after 11 seasons of TV’s The Jeffersons, he went in the wrong direction. It’s the rare Alan Smithee film so wretched, Alan Smithee might rethink his pseudonymous credit of disownment.
Plainclothes policemen Buford (Hemsley) and Benny (Luis Avalos, TV’s The Electric Company) are ordered to evict any remaining residents of Magnolia House, a former plantation home supposedly haunted by the spirits of its slaves and their evil owner. And it is! An odd concept for a PG family comedy, but let’s go with it, because Ghost Fever gives us no other choice.
Minutes after entering the mansion, Buford’s buried his nose deep in a book about groins. Two of the place’s transparent specters, Jethro (also Hemsley), and the slaveholder’s nonbigoted son (Myron Healey, 1977’s Claws), set about shooting animated lightning from their palms to put Buford through the ringer. Thus, Hemsley engages in the lowest-order form of slapstick shenanigans, including:
• running on a treadmill to avoid a wall of spikes
• dodging swinging pendulums
• sliding up doors and twirling ’round like a pinwheel as if he were controlled by magnets
• being tickled by ghosts while scaling a bedsheet rope
• tap dancing against a breakdancing mummy
• and, in the coup de grâce, shimmying left and right to protect his testicles from being sledgehammered into flapjacks, all while nearly having his rectum perforated by a whirling metal drill
And what of Benny? He gets to play pool against a phantom he can’t see, which leads to a swordfight with cue sticks. For another fight, Smithee Lee Madden (Angel Unchained) also cuts to a boxing match where Benny spars with pro pugilist Joe Frazier.
No one in Ghost Fever contracts ghost fever, but both men risk ghost chlamydia by falling in lust with two blonde sorta-babe spirits (Diana Brookes and Just Before Dawn’s Deborah Benson) who can’t leave Magnolia or they’ll turn old and ugly. At the movie’s close, as Buford and Benny drive away sad and mutter they’re better off dead, Jethro zaps their car to crash, killing both men instantly so they can bone their way through the afterlife. Kids gotta learn sometime, right?
The film is startlingly out of touch with how comedies operate. Not even the combined might of three writers cracked that code; their script exhibits the rhythm of jokes without the reasoning to select proper words that would make a joke. For example: “If that’s a French accent, I’m speakin’ Italian!”
Funny? Fuggedaboutit. —Rod Lott