Raspberry Picking: Ghosts Can’t Do It (1990)

Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies ever. This time, we’re looking at Ghosts Can’t Do It, winner of four Razzies (including Worst Picture, a tie with The Adventures of Ford Farlaine) and killer of multiple film careers.

Someday we might feature a movie on Raspberry Picking that did not come to us from the Black Lagoon of Slimy, Sordid Hollywood Shenanigans, but today is not that day. In 1972, 46-year-old John “Robin Hood” Derek was on the Greek island of Mykonos making a film tentatively entitled Once Upon a Love with his wife Linda Evans and a sixteen-year-old high school student named Mary Cathleen Collins. Over the course of filming, Derek and Collins began an affair. Evans returned to the United States in 1974, where she very angrily and publicly filed for divorce. Derek and Collins lay low in Germany until she turned eighteen in 1976, when they married and Collins legally changed her name to Bo Derek.

For a few years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it looked like Bo Derek was going to be the next major Hollywood sex symbol and make white girl cornrows a fashion statement. She launched to household name as the Resident Hot Girl in Blake Edwards’s critically and financially successful romcom 10, and she nabbed a starring role in Richard Lang’s A Change of Seasons alongside Anthony Hopkins and Shirley Maclaine. But after A Change of Seasons scored only moderate box office receipts and hostile reviews, Bo’s non-Playboy offers began to dry up. The word was getting around that while she was hot as hell and generated delicious gossip, Bo wasn’t especially good at that whole acting thing.

So Bo spent the 1980s exclusively starring in movies directed by her doting husband John. They released four films together over the course of the decade, all with very small budgets and very large amounts of Bo’s naked body onscreen. The first, Fantasies, was the final cut of the previously unreleased film that had brought John and Bo together in the first place. The remaining three were all nominees for the Razzie Award for Worst Picture. Tarzan, the Ape Man lost out to Mommie Dearest in 1982, but Bolero cleaned up in 1985, as did their fourth and final film together: 1989’s Ghosts Can’t Do It.

 

Ghosts Can’t Do It – which, for SEO reasons, I am required to type out in full several times – struck a killing blow to the careers of both Dereks. It reared its head very briefly in theaters in June of 1990 before ducking away as critics and audiences hurled invective at it. John never directed another feature film, and Bo found herself consigned to the doldrums of the D-list, with only one starring role (1993’s Woman of Desire alongside Robert Mitchum) for the remainder of the decade. The movie itself got a Blu-Ray release – a real Blu-Ray release! – as a double-feature with Bolero.  Aside from being made fun of in some YouTube videos, it hasn’t done much else.

So, does Ghosts Can’t Do It deserve its reputation as artless, talentless creek-bottom hackery, or…you know what, let’s not play dumb games. Yes. It’s bad. It’s very, very bad.

In fact, Ghosts Can’t Do It is so awful, so absurd, so heart-stoppingly asinine that I simply cannot accept that John and Bo Derek made this thing in earnest. No, my friends, I choose to believe that John and Bo were playing an elaborate prank on the movie-viewing public. Ghosts Can’t Do It isn’t a movie; it’s an acceptance of the Tide Pod Challenge, thirty years before its time. It deliberately, systematically flouts all known rules for making art and telling stories. And if you enjoy Z-grade trash even a little bit, it’s one hell of a good time.

 

THE BAD

Let’s start with the title, because Lord God, how do you talk about anything else before that.

Ghosts Can’t Do It. They’re not serious. They can’t be serious. The laws governing the physical universe do not allow for the possibility that they are serious. I don’t care how far up in the clouds John and Bo’s heads were floating when they conceived this movie, not one single solitary person in this sinful world has such a poor understanding of words and their effects and meanings that they earnestly came up with and used the title GHOSTS CAN’T DO IT for a serious real-life motion picture.

No one has ever failed Movie Titles 101 that spectacularly. Even Tommy Wiseau and Neil Breen understood mysterious, deceptive simplicity. Even Joe “Troll 2” D’Amato recognized the possibilities of a single noun. Even Hal P. “Manos: The Hands of Fate” Warren knew not to mess too much with the tried-and-true The X of Y formula. Hell, even John Derek himself knew he could grab some irrelevant but sexy-sounding Spanish word and throw it on his movie and nobody would look twice because they were too busy looking at boobs. So no, you cannot convince me that not only did he think Ghosts Can’t Do It was a good title, but that he then slapped his name on the (barely legible) title card right next to it like he thinks he’s presenting Casablanca for a new age.

The entire opening credits sequence is something to behold. Bo, wearing the first of many off-putting hats that she will sport over the course of the film, looks a little like Sam Neill’s dead wife in Event Horizon, owing in part to godawful lighting that makes her look like she has no eyes. Her co-star, two-time Oscar-winner Anthony Quinn, appears to be playing a white Sitting Bull, and his face indicates that someone screwed up his order very badly at the drive-thru. The whole thing is made of these sepia-drenched stills of snow-covered mountains and horses and unflattering poses that give the impression we’re about to watch an old-timey documentary on the Donner Party’s descent into madness.

Of course, once the story – a term I am using according to its very loosest definition – begins, the credits sequence looks pedestrian by comparison. The story, which I am not making up any part of, goes as follows: Katie (Bo Derek) is happily married to much older and extremely rich Scott (Quinn, who cannot have been this hard up for work, and so must have been in on the joke). Katie calls him “Great One,” apparently a reference to the expression “Great Scott,” because that’s the kind of serious intellectual movie we are watching. The two of them spend their days cavorting around the Rockies in silly costumes until Scott suffers a heart attack, which they both initially treat as a mild annoyance. However, when Scott learns that he’ll never fully recover and enjoy the life he’s used to living with Katie, he kills himself. But whoops! Committing suicide means that Scott cannot truly rest, says Angel with Butterfly Wings On Her Hands (Julie Newmar), and he must haunt the earth as a ghost. Scott and Katie are at first overjoyed to be reunited across the supernatural realm, but their joy turns to bitter tears when they realize that Scott’s being a non-corporeal spirit means they can’t maintain their previous exuberant sex life. Because ghosts can’t Do It, do you understand, because if you don’t, Katie will plaintively whine that exact phrase to make sure you can’t possibly misinterpret their problem.

So Katie and Scott hatch a plan. They will find an attractive young man and kill him, allowing Scott to possess and reanimate his body at the moment of his death, and thus enabling them to have sex again. I’ll pause for a moment while you digest that information.

They set their sights on a dead-eyed hunk of man meat named, I swear to God, Fausto Garibaldi (Leo Damian) who has his own sights on Katie, but the plan gets complicated when Katie shockingly realizes that committing murder doesn’t come easily to her. Or, as she puts it when Scott first proposes the plan: “I don’t know, Scott. That’s kinky stuff. We’ve never been kinky.” In the meantime, Katie flies around the world running Scott’s nonspecific multi-billion dollar business and engaging in subplots that go nowhere and mean nothing, because they’re all a distraction from the main event of Katie and Scott trying to off Fausto so that they can use his corpse to bone.

So that’s the plot, the real plot, and it only gets weirder from there. I could attempt to describe the feverish surrealism of the dialogue in Ghosts Can’t Do It, but it will perhaps be more illustrative if I simply quote a few choice lines:

When Scott has the heart attack:

SCOTT: Katie, I think we’re having a heart attack.

KATIE: No! You’re having a thrill again! This is just one of your goddamn thrills!

SCOTT (collapsing): Katie, I don’t make the fuckin’ rules!

 

A bit later, Scott lying on the ground:

KATIE: Oh, Great One, is this the real thing?

SCOTT: It’s a goosy situation, baby.

 

An alarming number of times, including as he is on the ground, having a heart attack:

SCOTT: Will you let me bite your lip?

 

After Scott kills himself and comes back as a ghost:

SCOTT: God was gonna kill me, so I beat him to it with a twelve-gauge.

KATIE: You could have taken pills!

SCOTT: Real men don’t eat quiche.

Much later, when a creepy guy is chasing Katie around a hotel lobby:

KATIE: No! I can’t let you rape me!

CREEPY GUY: Hi! What makes you think I want to rape you?

KATIE: Because there are a lot of rapists in the world.

 

Talking to a random woman she just met about the Scott situation:

KATIE: He wants to know if you know anything about possession.

RANDOM WOMAN: Is he looking for a body?

KATIE: You know about it?

RANDOM WOMAN: I’m a white witch!

 

I need to stop before I just quote the entire movie, but the entire script is like that. John Derek ran several trashy romance novels through a blender with some R.E.M. lyrics and a dash of LSD and called it a screenplay.

No other element of the film fares any better. Take the costumes, for example. An uncredited costume designer, perhaps Bo herself, gifted Bo an enormous collection of silly-looking hats, and at different points she wears a dead fox, a dead buffalo, and a dead Christmas tree on her head. The music by Junior Homrich and Randall Tico, who were clearly just happy for the work and figured out early on that they could get away with whatever, consists mostly of maudlin guitars or inappropriate pounding drumbeats reminiscent of those in Blood Feast.

And then there are the technical elements, if we can call them that. In addition to the director, John Derek is also the credited cinematographer and editor, and he clearly has no idea how to do either. He can point a camera sort of in the direction of the thing he wants to put on film, but that’s about where his control begins and ends. He does not remember the concept of “blocking” from his days as an actor, and he lets his actors wander aimlessly around the frame in various states of undress. The daytime scenes are blasted with the harsh white light we associate with school picture day, making everyone look a little bit sick at all times. The nighttime scenes are shot in soft focus so blurry that the actors seem to be melting into each other, except when a light comes on and reflects off their eyeballs and hair hard enough to blind somebody.

But there are also the ghost scenes! The budget of Ghosts Can’t Do It is unknown (my guess is “not large”), but they didn’t spend any of it on making Ghost Scott appear ghostly. They have instead locked Anthony Quinn in a closet and superimposed a swimming pool on top of him. God bless Mr. Quinn. He tries as hard as he can to perform this part with sincerity, but no one could have salvaged his lines. That he manages to look only as goofy as everyone else while the ghost effects are turned on is a real triumph.

Oh yeah, Donald Trump is also in the movie, playing himself, for like five minutes. And you know what? We’re not even going to discuss it. Because it’s one of the least interesting things going on here, and other people have made more than enough noise about it.

 

THE GOOD

Ghosts Can’t Do It contains exactly one scene that hits a dead-on bullseye. Okay, well, no, it’s still poorly lit and awkwardly staged, but let’s keep our expectations where they belong. It comes directly on the heels of one of its biggest ironic belly laughs, a scene in which a priest castigates Katie for the irresistible sensuality of her dancing (“It’s all right, Reverend! Your she-devil won’t dance anymore tonight!”) and, in a frenzy of uncontrollable lust, grabs her head and prays.

Throughout the film, Katie and Ghost Scott have a point of contention in that Katie likes to dance (perhaps – she also tells us that she has never danced before, but internal consistency is one of Ghosts Can’t Do It’s many weaknesses). Scott, while he was alive, never wanted to dance with her, a hang-up he now regrets. After the priest objects to Katie’s stripper dance, Katie puts on music for a slow dance, and Ghost Scott takes her in his arms. They talk in generic but non-insane sweet nothings. They wear serene, joyful smiles, as though laughing at a private little joke of the sort of which married couples over time develop an extensive archive. Bo/Katie loses the plasticky wide-eyed Stepford smile she has been wearing for the entire movie and lets her face settle into a natural expression that shows off her beauty better than any of the nude scenes. During this scene, I believe, if only for a fleeting moment, that Scott and Katie really do share the sort of love that transcends time, space, fleeting human existence, and ethereal swimming pools. It is, and I sincerely do say this without a lick of irony, incredibly romantic.

Of course, the movie instantly ruins it by quick-cutting to Katie miming the slow dance with an invisible partner and looking ridiculous. But for thirty crucial seconds, Ghosts Can’t Do It lets its mask fall. John Derek doesn’t really know how to direct a movie, and Bo Derek doesn’t really know how to perform in one, but the filmmakers do know and can accurately portray what an honest romance between two unlikely lovers looks like. They were in one, after all.

That’s what I mean when I say this is all an elaborate joke at the audience’s expense. The nutty plot, the insane faux-surrealist dialogue, the dozen subplots that go nowhere, the cheap barely-there effects, the incompetence on display in every frame – it’s all there on purpose. It’s too wrong to have been done unknowingly. Everything has been fine-tuned to provoke critics and viewers already inclined to dislike the Dereks. No one flicks a wet towel at their audience’s butt this hard on accident. 

Not knowing either Derek, I’m not going to judge their real-life relationship. Like most people, I find the idea of a middle-aged man screwing around with a teenager gross on principle. But the simple fact, no matter how it makes anyone else feel, is that the Dereks were married and stayed married for twenty-two years until John’s death in 1998. During their marriage, they seem to have had a swell time making gloriously crappy movies together. Ghosts Can’t Do It is John and Bo Derek telling the rest of the world to go piss off, because they’re having fun, they’re doing it in their own way, and they long ago ceased caring what you think of them. It forces us to rethink our idea of a “labor of love.” And it suggests that even as Ghosts Can’t Do It ended both their careers, they went down laughing together at their private little joke. What lovelier way to kiss your respectability goodbye? 

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a Blu-Ray I need to purchase.

Quality of Movie: ½/5. OR MAYBE 5/5. Who even knows at this point. Who even cares.

Quality of Experience: 4.5/5. A few draggy bits towards the end, but still a must-see for any trash aficionado.

Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida.  She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects.  You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog!