This frantic comedy-chiller saw the last film appearance together of star-director Gene Wilder and real-life wife, comedienne Gilda Radner, who died from cancer in 1989. It's a send-up of old thunderstorm mystery films, but relentlessly overplayed. The main character, who has irrational fears that someone plans to cure by literally scaring him to death, spends the entire story in his spooky ancestral home. The cast mug and scream enthusiastically, but the film only manages a few chuckles rather than belly laughs. Wilder's direction is brimming with good ideas, though his pacing is erratic and the chills catch the eye but not the throat. The vital difference between this and the similar Bob Hope classic The Cat and the Canary is the lack of feeling that any of this is for real. Only little Ann Way, as the fierce maid-of-all-trades, seems to have come from the old dark houses we used to know.

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