High Spirits

Once you get past the clumsily antic early scenes, the moody texture can take hold of your imagination. At its best, the film is a soft Irish kiss.

Luckily, High Spirits has a good cast and enough joie de vivre to rise above some of its underlying clumsiness.

It's safe, it's mainstream and it's silly, but Guttenberg and Hannah strike up enough chemistry to give this big budget apparition at least a little depth.

The film shows very little of the nar-rative assurance that has character-ized Jordan's previous work. [21 Nov 1988, p.2C]

Writer-director Neil Jordan shows no knack for comedy, nor is he as kinky as he was on Mona Lisa, and kinky is what is called for.

The American big-movie sex comedy conventions overwhelm Jordan’s liberating poetry, his wild lyricism.

Neil Jordan's High Spirits wants to be a supernatural comedy. But it isn't super, it isn't natural, it isn't high, and it isn't spirited. [18 Nov 1988, p.33]

The 1980s were full of fantasy comedies, and 1988 marked a turning point for the genre. While Tim Burton redefined ghost stories with the quirky Beetlejuice, Neil Jordan attempted something similar with High Spirits. Set in rural Ireland, the film follows Peter Plunkett, the desperate owner of a failing castle-turned-hotel, who fakes hauntings to attract tourists—only to discover the place is genuinely haunted by a tragic couple trapped in a time loop. Despite a promising setup, the film bombed at the box office and it’s clear why: poorly written characters, unconvincing gags, flat romance, and scares that rarely work (except for the terrifying ghost nuns). Even Steve Guttenberg’s energy and Daryl Hannah’s star power couldn’t save it—she even received a Razzie nomination. The film feels disjointed, starting strong with Irish atmosphere but quickly losing pace, with Peter O’Toole’s character inexplicably vanishing midway through. According to Jordan, this was the result of producers re-editing the film without his input, essentially altering the story he intended to tell. As a child, I remembered High Spirits as a fun comedy, but watching it years later reveals a film that no longer holds up.