A psychopath is a psychopath, in or out of the coffin.
It's never a good sign when one watches two comedies and sits stone-faced through both of them. I'm not sure what possessed William Castle to make two Sid Caesar vehicles back to back, but they both should have held out for scripts with actual jokes. The first one out of the gate for me was 1967's The Busy Body, in which Caesar plays George Norton, a mid-level mob flunky with good fashion sense bumped up to a place on the board by big boss Charley Barker (Robert Ryan), then tasked with recovering $1 million in payoffs that have accidentally been buried with a recently deceased associate.
Based on a novel by Donald E. Westlake, Ben Starr's script sends George on a wild goose chase that's meant to evoke the frenetic It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (also featuring Caesar), but without the free-wheeling ambition and with a less-sprawling cast. That said, it does include Anne Baxter as one of two amorous widows who throw themselves at George, Kay Medford as his nagging mother, Richard Pryor making his big-screen debut as a police lieutenant who makes it his mission to find out why people keep dropping like flies around him, Dom DeLuise as one of the flies who gets a meat cleaver in the back, and Godfrey Cambridge as an opportunistic mob underling. At the outset, it seems like they're going to have the same goal -- get their hands on that $1 million -- but in the end they all turn out to have different, completely unrelated agendas.
Even taking into account how much of the plot hinges on which suit the dead man was buried in, there's still way too much business about George's sartorial sense and Charley's obsession with appearances. And the running gag about George's mother calling him at inopportune moments runs out of steam in a hurry. The film also features so much business with corpses that it plays like a macabre dry run for Castle's swan song Shanks. Pour on some blatant Coca-Cola product placement and a sprightly score by Vic Mizzy that underlines every single joke and you've got a recipe for would-be hilarity that most definitely does not ensue. Castle and Caesar were back later that year, though, with a very different, but still morbid, comic creation.
Again scripted by Ben Starr, who had previously co-written Our Man Flint and would go on to create the sitcoms The Facts of Life and Silver Spoons, and scored by Vic Mizzy, The Spirit Is Willing flies in the face of the 1989 Bo Derek vehicle Ghosts Can't Do It since it's centered on three restless 19th-century spirits -- a sea captain, his homely wife, and their pretty maid -- locked in an eternal love triangle who cause all kinds of poltergeist activity at the New England house leased sight-unseen by overworked magazine editor Ben Powell (Sid Caesar) and his family. Ben has been given a leave of absence so he can get some much-needed R&R, but he would have little chance of that even without a trio of mischievous ghosts busting up the joint since he and his wife Kate (Vera Miles) have a rather contentious relationship with their gawky teenage son Steve (Barry Gordon), not to mention Kate's rich uncle George (John McGiver), who lords his wealth over Ben, who ribs him right back since he made all his money in toilets.
The first half of the film is taken up by a lot of yelling and door-slamming, only some of which can be blamed on the destructive ghosts, a decidedly unimaginative bunch. (You can only see a someone materialize out of a cloud of red smoke so many times before it gets old.) Then Steve meets local girl Priscilla (Jill Townsend, who also plays the spectral maid and her own sister, the town librarian), who knows all about the ghosts and how to get in contact with -- and possibly exorcise -- them. All comes to a head on the night of Steve's 16th birthday bash, which he insists be nautical-themed so all the guests will be dressed as sailors and one can be sacrificed to the frustrated virgin who started the whole thing by taking a meat cleaver to her husband and his mistress. (So that makes two movies in a row with a cleaver-in-the-back gag.) About the only bright spot is John Astin's all-too-brief turn as Uncle George's in-house headshrinker, who's introduced treating director William Castle and is flown in to assess the situation. Suffice it to say, he does little to remedy it.