ALICE KRIGE HAUNTS 'GHOST STORY' WITH CRAIG WASSON

Ghost Story YEAR: 1981

Despite the hypnotic presence of gorgeous, classic, timeless beauty Alice Krige; Golden Era classic actors like Fred Astaire and Melvyn Douglas; producer turned ever-monotone veteran performer John Houseman; and dark horse Douglas Fairbanks Jr. headlining a horror movie based on an aptly titled novel by Peter Straub; the buried lead is Craig Wasson, a character-actor who looks like Bill Maher's version of a leading man...

Alice Krige Ghost Story

And Wasson, other than Brian De Palma's BODY DOUBLE a few years later, would usually be second or third banana, featured in two Vietnam flicks in 1978, the underrated BOYS IN COMPANY C and GO TELL THE SPARTANS and, also remembered as the helpful shrink in a surprisingly decent sequel NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS, he's been around the block...

Ghost Story Alice Krige

But enough of Craig's career... let's center on his character... or rather, characters... playing twin brothers Don and David Wanderley whose father, Fairbanks' Edward, is part of a group of four distinquished old men who gather in an annual reunion telling scary tales, and, it turns out, they might be connected to a death after Wasson's Don Wanderley, as a passive college professor, had a too-perfect love affair with a gorgeous, mysterious stranger...

Before another nude shot

Enter Alice Krige, who also plays dual roles, kind of, and neither let their true feelings show. Her progressive character, Alma Mobley, highlights the pivotal backstory along with the four old-timers during their younger preppy high-society days, an aesthetically pleasing time-period production hindered by the fact none look anything close to their younger selves... If you don't remember all the names of the coots from the previous scenes, you might have trouble keeping score on who's exactly who... and that's extremely important!

The spookiest aspect is thoroughly embodied in Krige herself, literally epitomizing classic beauty, wielding a lithe prowess in the current time-line and shining even brighter in the backstory as her sophisticated yet promiscuous, and ultimately horrifying starlet makes the past blend into the present in a nicely filmed vehicle including a moody hired thug and police investigator, developing within an old fashion, page-turning aura yet not without exploiting the 1980's bloody body-count horror genre that, despite some pretty dated special effects, remains nail-biting (and often downright gruesome) from beginning to end.

Alice Krige gorgeously haunts GHOST STORY