For this Rogue Reviewers Roundtable review the theme was ghost stories. Basically, I had to choose a film that had a ghost in it. So what to choose? There are a lot of great classic movies that have ghosts, but for some reason this one popped into my head. I'm not sure why, but I seemed to remember that it was a movie about someone being tormented by a ghost. I had never seen the film before, but I figured it would be a good opportunity to check it out since another one of the Rogues reviewed it recently and said it was pretty good. So here we are...

Tormented is about a jazz pianist named Tom who is about to marry a girl named Meg. The only thing standing in the way is an old flame named Vi who's popped in out of nowhere to blackmail him because she wants him for herself and she swears that no one else will ever have him. So they meet in this abandoned lighthouse on the beach where Tom lives, and end up going up to the top. While they're up there, Vi leans against the rail and it breaks. She manages to hold on to it and begs Tom to save her, but he doesn't, and she falls to her death. Now it's revenge time. She comes back in ghostly form and begins to torment him, driving him to the edge of near madness. Throughout the movie she keeps interfering with his plans to marry meg, and in the end she manages to stop it all together.

Meg has a little sister named Sandy who absolutely loves Tom. Unfortunately for her, at one point towards the end of the film, she sees him kill a man who was blackmailing him over his suspicions that he had killed Vi. Sandy talked to him about it right before the wedding, and he basically swears her to secrecy. After the wedding is ruined, he goes to the lighthouse to tell Vi she's won, and Sandy shows up. Now up to this point in the film, we felt sorry for Tom for the most part, but now he's reached a point where he can't rely on Sandy to stay silent about what she saw, so he's planning on tossing her off the top of the lighthouse as well just to keep his secret. He doesn't want to do it, and he's miserable about it, but Vi has tormented him so much that he's become desperate. When they get to the top, Vi's apparition appears and comes at him before he can do anything to Sandy, causing him to fall over the edge to his death.

Tormented is a well written, well acted film, that manages to tell a compelling story despite it's overly cheesy special effects. Normally I would think the cheesiness would be a good thing, but some of the effects in this went a little beyond cheesy and well over into hokey. Still, the fact that they were hokey sort of gave the film a certain charm that added to my enjoyment of it considerably. Sure they could have just had a ghostly voice or a double exposure apparition or whatever, and in fact they did. The cool thing was, they also had ghostly footprints, ghostly hands, and a ghostly severed head that nagged at Tom from beyond the grave. The effects weren't overused, nor were they underused. They were used just enough to enhance the story and make it flow well. Had there been more ghostly encounters than there were, or if they had lasted longer than they did, it would have really detracted from the overall quality of the story because it would have taken away from Tom's interactions with other people who weren't seeing or hearing any of what he was encountering. It was the fact that only he seemed to know what was going on that drove him mad, and that's exactly the way it should have been.

The actors all for the most part did a really good job with the story. I do want to commend Susan Gordon (Sandy) on the fabulous job she did. It's got to be tough for child actors to do a good job with material they may only semi-understand, but she was just outstanding. She was a great little actress, which I suppose only makes sense since she was the daughter of a filmmaker. Still, it's a shame that she ended her acting career in 1967. She could have continued on to do some really great things.

The quality of the film on this disc is ok, but it's nothing special. I'd say on a quality level, it would probably rate around 5 out of 10. I've seen worse, but Madacy generally doesn't do anything to clean up the classic films they release. The DVD does have a second feature, Lady Frankenstein, and an intermission cartoon, Private Eye Popeye, which I thought was a nice touch on Madacy's part. The screenshots up above do not reflect in any way the actual quality of the film because I've cleaned those up quite heavily for the review. The video clip is a better representation of the film's overall quality. There is another release of this film on a disc from Alpha Video, but I don't own that one so I'm not able to compare the quality of their transfer to the transfer quality of the Madacy release. Generally, Alpha's discs are pretty decent quality and are extremely inexpensive, so you usually can't go too wrong when you pick up their releases.

I've been debating whether or not this film could have been a bit shorter. Going over it in my head and thinking about the story and how it played out, I'd have to say no. While a few minutes could have been cut out, overall the film was well paced and almost the entire thing is dedicated to telling the story. There are a few scenes of Tom and others walking around that could have been cut, but they wouldn't have added up to much.

While this isn't the kind of a ghost story you'd want to watch on Halloween night, or even at a late night scary movie get together with your friends, it would be a quality film to watch on a saturday afternoon with a pizza and some root beer. I know that doesn't really say much for the scariness of it, and in fact it shouldn't. This movie wasn't scary at all, but it was a really nice and entertainingly fun flick nonetheless.

When it came down to deciding what kind of a rating to give it, rather than focusing on one point or another looking for things that might drag it down or boost it up, I chose to look at the film as a whole, which ultimately led to me awarding it a rating of...