Through the years Hyrum managed to swindle and steal a small fortune. Convinced that his unscrupulous attorney, Reginald Ripper (Basil Rathbone), will try and keep the money for himself, for his good deed, Hyrum will make sure that the money goes to the rightful heirs. The Powers that Be, however, have a few ground rules for the deceased doing good deeds. The stickler is that Hyrum can’t leave the crypt. (By this time, Karloff wasn’t moving very fast so this plot convenience is understandable and forgivable.) Not a problem. Whatever calls for a supernatural intervention, Cicely will take care of it. Hyrum then gazes into his fully functional crystal ball and introduces us to his three heirs: two youngsters, Chuck Phillips and Lily Norton (Tommy Kirk and Deborah Walley), and an old crackpot, Myrtle Forbush (Patsy Kelly), as they make their way to his secluded mansion for the reading of the will. He also spies Ripper conspiring with J. Sinister Hulk (Jesse White) to bump them all off and take the loot, confirming Hyrum's suspicions of the crooked lawyer.

The three unsuspecting heirs meet Ripper at Stokely’s allegedly haunted mansion. Escorting them all inside, Myrtle tries to perform a séance but as she tries to contact Hyrum, they're interrupted by a flying knife -- that barely misses Lily’s head! A note attached to the blade reads "Those who remain tonight won’t live to see tomorrow." That’s enough for Lily, who tries to leave, but Chuck talks her out of it. The will is to be read later, at midnight, and if the heir isn’t present, they'll forfeit their share. With time to kill -- maybe a bad choice of words -- they try the séance again, but this time, a falling chandelier almost crushes them.

It was Hulk who threw the knife out of one of the mansion's many secret doors and passageways, but it was Cicely who accidentally jarred the chandelier loose.

Chuck grows suspicious that someone is trying to scare them off. Their attention is drawn outside where a large, double-decker bus crammed with displaced beachniks loudly invades the mansion -- including Myrtle’s nephew, Bobby (Aaron Kincaid), and his girlfriend, Vicki (Nancy Sinatra), the Bob Fuller Four (all together now -- "I fought the law and the -PAUSE- law won…") and about fifty others who hit the pool, and we get our first song as the jerks do the Monkey.

Speaking of monkeys, the rest of Hulk’s henchmen, Chicken Feather (Benny Dubin), Yolanda (Bobbi Shaw) and Monstro, her pet gorilla, can’t find Stokely’s mansion. (Monstro is played by Ro-Man, himself, George Barrows.) They cross paths with Erik Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck) and his biker gang of Rats and Mice. When they all wind up in a lake (don’t ask), Von Zipper falls in love with Yolanda after she saves him from drowning.

Back at the mansion, Chuck and Lily form a mutual partnership to watch each other’s back. Outside at the pool, a rousing game of Ringamathing winds down. (It’ll be bigger than the hula-hoop! Could this be the first case of blatant product placement in film?) Ripper introduces Bobby to his daughter, Sinistra (Quinn O’Hara), and Sinistra's good looks are matched only by her evil intentions. Luring Bobby into the mansion for an arsenic highball, luckily, without her glasses, she’s as blind as a bat, and with a little help from Cicely, Sinistra inadvertently feeds the toxic concoction to a suit of armor. (Whose screams sound suspiciously like the giant arachnid in Earth vs. the Spider.)

As night falls, Von Zipper and his gang follow Hulk and his cronies through a secret entrance into the mansion. In the garden, Malcolm (Francis X Bushman), the butler, tries to warn the young heirs of Ripper's treachery, but they think he’s just trying to scare them. And as soon as they’re gone, Ripper kills him. With midnight fast approaching, the myopic Sinistra blows another attempt to cull Bobby from the herd and kill him. And while the Bob Fuller Four serenades the lonely Vicki by the pool, a storm whips up, chasing everyone inside, just as the clock strikes twelve.

Chuck and Bobby decide to bunk together. When Hulk tries to scare them off, only Bobby sees him and spazzes out. Thinking Bobby’s gone crazy, Chuck leaves to check on Lily. After he's gone, Bobby finds a monster in his bed and freaks out, waking everyone else up. (The monster is a cameo by one of Larry Buchanan’s the the Eye Creatures.) Outside, in the rain, Monstro escapes his cage and makes his way inside where Chuck is trying to calm everyone down. Swearing that Bobby just had a nightmare, he convinces everyone to go back to bed. But Bobby does convince Chuck to at least call the police, who then leaves to find a phone. Alone again, Bobby barely escapes Monstro’s attack.

Upstairs, Hulk, Chicken Feather and Yolanda are convinced that the mansion really is haunted. (Cicely has been foiling their assassination attempts and playing tricks on them all day.) They try to leave, but Ripper and his revolver force them to stay. Herding them forward to investigate the noises downstairs, they use another secret passage and head down -- not realizing Bobby saw and heard the whole thing.

Down in the basement, the bad guys find Lily just as she wakes up. They bind and gag her, and then lash her to a log on an old sawmill display with a working buzz-saw, dispatching the girl to her to her doom just as Chuck, Bobby and the others find the dungeon. Ripper and the others try to pass themselves off as wax dummies until Bobby discovers that one of them is breathing, and then the inevitable slapstick fight breaks out. The battle goes back and forth as the gears on the buzz saw ride are switched from forward to reverse about fifty times. Luckily, with some inadvertent help from Sinistra, the bad guys are thwarted, Lily is saved in the nick of time, and the money is found with Cupid’s statue pointing the way. (Eureka! Look to the Prince of Love.) 

Defeated, Ripper pulls a gun. I he can't have the money -- then no one can. But Cicely plugs the barrel just as he fires, and the gun explodes sending Ripper to his great reward.

Okay, despite the imminent, camp-induced cerebral hemorrhage, I will now attempt to spill my thoughts about this film onto my keyboard without throwing a neural rod. (Oy! This is going to hurt.) Ghost in the Invisible Bikini was the seventh and last of AIP’s Beach Party movies. Since the genre was running out of steam, they went to the old axiom of just add monsters and combined the beach movie with the monster movies that first put them on the map in the late '50s in a valiant attempt to keep the cash cow going. (Just like Universal did when they combined their classic monsters with Abbott & Costello.)

It was a mixed result. The returns weren’t that great and the Beach Party movie officially died. Don’t get me wrong. I like this movie -- a lot, but it could have been so much better. Heck, I’ll admit to enjoying the entire AIP Beach Party canon. (An attitude I’m sure that will get me drummed off of the B-Movie Message Board.) By the last movie, Frankie and Annette were long gone, but Harvey Lembeck is back as one of my favorite characters -- Erik Von Zipper. His odd combination of Brando’s Wild One and all Three Stooges never fails to crack me up. I love the way he's always yelling and smacking his gang around, and how he always manages to give himself the finger. (No, not that finger, the Himalayan Suspenders Treatment Finger.)

The film's stars are Kirk and Walley but they aren’t given a lot to do, and frankly, really aren’t on the screen all that often. Walley’s longest scene is her Perils of Pauline riff on the buzz saw ride. Karloff, Rathbone, Kelly and the other, older players appear to be having more fun than their young co-stars. But the real star of the film is Stokely’s Mansion with its intricate design and myriad secret passageways that the director Don Weis put to good use. If I ever win the lottery, it’s a sure bet that my Casa de Romper Room will be filled with trapdoors, sliding panels and a Chamber of Horrors -- complete with damsel and buzz-saw.

Music was always an integral part of the Beach Party movie, and in Ghost it isn’t all that bad. The Bob Fuller Four joins the Pyramids and the Hondells by doing a competent job of filling Dick Dale and the Del-Tone's shoes. Still a few months away from her big hits, Sinatra chimes in with "Geronimo" -- but Quinn O’Hara steals her thunder with a sexy and sultry rendition of "Don’t fight it Baby" while trying to seduce Kincaid.

While hacking out this review, the room starts to spin on me as I wonder if Hulk, Yolanda and Chicken Feather were former, disgruntled circus employees of Stokely. Was the man an avid hunter? as each room in the house has about five dead animals in it. And just where the heck did Monstro go? And then the room starts to go dark as I chuckle at all the sniping Karloff lays on Rathbone. (Does anybody else think about this stuff?)

Luckily, for you, my brain has slipped it’s clutch and I’m just grinding gears now. So until next time, brush up on the Jerk, the Monkey and the Watusi...And the Watusi...And the wastusiaaaccckhbbbbtttthhhhh...

Posted: 05/18/00. Copy and paste at your own legal risk.

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