Let's Kill Uncle (1966)

Waste of time

Sorry, this movie sucks

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Let's Kill Uncle (1966) * 1/2 (out of 4)The more work I see from William Castle the more I'm starting to realize that without Vincent Price or another star then the director struggled quite a bit. I don't think it's his direction that really killed everything he was involved in but there's no question that he was doing some rather strange movies during this period of his career. In the film, young Barbaby (Pat Cardi) has $5 million left to him after his father died in a car crash. He goes to an island to live with his WW2 vet uncle (Nigel Green) and soon the boy realizes that his uncle is trying to kill him for the money. Barnaby and a female friend (Mary Badham) decide the best thing to do is just kill the uncle first. Three years prior to this film Castle made 13 FRIGHTENED GIRLS!, which was a strange mix of Nancy Drew and Cold War but the strangest thing about that film is that it put young girls in violence and sexual situations and I really wondered who in their right mind would want to watch a film like that. I felt the same way with this thing because who wants to watch a childish film about an uncle wanting to kill this kid or having the tables turned and the two kids killing the uncle? Castle brings a very childish tone to the entire film and for the life of me I couldn't figure out who he was making this thing for. Adults are going to be bored out of their minds and wondering why they're watching a movie about kids being targets and kids are simply going to hit the stop button within a few minutes of the film starting. I'm sure some would defend the light story and the simple direction but to me the thing had a very bad pace and it just never picked up any steam as it went along. The horror elements are basically a deformed cripple guy, some spiders and a swimming pool with a shark in it. Not very scary. None of the performances are all that impressive either with Green going way over the top and not making a for a very interesting character. Cardi is extremely bland in his part and at times he's so annoying that you'll be rooting for the uncle. Badham is best known for her work in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and this would be her last film until 2005. LET'S KILL UNCLE is pretty rare in terms of Castle's work and there's a good reason that this thing is still sitting in a vault.

William Castle was losing touch with his audience around this time and the cheap and efficient producer side of him was clearly winning over the carny style director side of him.The concept of a black comedy geared for kids was a bit novel but Pat Cardi is just too annoying as the little boy and some of the plot devices and effects are real eyeball rollers even for a vintage Castle movie.Nigel Green clearly knows what he's doing and refuses to play down to the material.It may seem like he's going over the top at times but his character is supposed to enjoy outwitting and doing away with the boy that stands in the way of his inheritance.As others have stated the scenes with the shark in the pool are pure hokum guaranteed to illicit peals of laughter as they shift from one scene of a rubbery fin by the diving board to an old and grainy shot of a shark in the ocean.The basic concept of who's killing who? Child or adult? could be remade quite effectively today but this is largely a flop, Stick with The TIngler Or House On Haunted Hill.

I remember this movie from my youth. I must have seen it for the first and last time around the mid-70's. I too finally found a DVD copy on the internet. I have always been drawn to see this movie in it's entirety, for I do not remember much of the movie besides the old hotel and the shark in the swimming pool. (Cheesy clips of the shark really "age" this movie compared to today's fix capabilities.) Approaching the young age of 40, perhaps I was trying to recapture some of my youth. None the less, the movie was a thrill to see after all of these years. I will keep it in my collection and let my boys watch it as I did in my younger days. Nigel Green is quite good in this movie, I must admit.

Though it starts off somewhat slowly, things instantly pick up when Nigel Green enters the scene. He is a hoot as the coniving uncle, and his various activities (like practicing judo in the house) and dialogue are hilarious (the breakfast conversation with his nephew is the best such scene. I would say the movie gets better as it goes along, getting more twisted with its black comedy. However, the final minute of the movie is a real disappointment. It's as if the screenwriter was running out of time to submit the script to the studio, and wrote in an ending both strange and feeling unfinished. It's still worth a look - if you can find it. It seems that Universal has withdrawn the movie for some reason, and currently the only way to watch the movie is through bootlegs. Perhaps the current owners of the studio are uncomfortable with the whole uncle-trying-to-kill-nephew/nephew-trying-to-kill-uncle thing, even though all this is never presented in a serious manner. Let's hope they eventually find a sense of humor.