Ruby

I remember all the way back to 1977, seeing the ads in the newspaper for RUBY.  It looked scary as hell, especially to an eight year old.  Appropriately, the movie was playing at the Skydrome Drive In in Lake Worth, just a a few miles from where I grew up.  I couldn't have realized at the time how apt that really was.  Not just because RUBY was a bona fide B-movie designed to play at such places, but also as a drive-in theater features prominently in this story of a mobster who comes back to haunt the place and its owners/workers after his death sixteen years earlier.  Why did he wait so long to get revenge on those who killed him? The movie does not answer this or many other questions you may pose.

The film takes place in early 1950s Florida.  Ruby Claire (Piper Laurie) a former lounge singer and wannabe film actress, and moll of said dead mobster, runs the profitable backwood drive-in that shows movies like ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN.  She lives with her boyfriend Vince (Stuart Whitman), mute daughter Leslie (Janit Baldwin), and a old guy in a wheelchair named Jake (Freed Kohler Jr.) who is always wearing sunglasses.  Nicky (Sal Vecchio) was Ruby's hood boyfriend back in '35, and the film opens with his murder in a swamp by a group of other hoods.  His own gang, apparently.  Leslie is the daughter he never lived to see. Well, actually....

Leslie begins acting stranger than usual.  She even contorts on her bed the way Linda Blair did in THE EXORCIST.  We will learn that Nicky's spirit has possessed his daughter.  At the same time, those mobsters who did Nicky in, now working at the theater in attempts to go legit, start dying in grisly fashions.  One even by celluloid noose in the projection booth.  Is it Nicky's apirition doing the deed, or Leslie under his control? Will Vince's old friend Dr. Keller (Roger Davis), an expert in the paranormal, unravel it all? Will Nicky come back to bring Ruby to his watery grave?

RUBY is a somewhat engaging bit of trash whose low budget gives it just the right feel.  It has some of the usual B-movie trappings, though curiously no real sexuality or excessive swearing.  There is a fair amount of blood, though violence is tame.  Director Curtis Harrington makes it feel creepy and atmospheric, which is all that really matters in a picture like this.

But some of the humor is really dumb.  The theme song is amusingly cheesy, and period appropriate.  The acting is decent to abominable, and Laurie, whose character is akin to a low rent Norma Desmond, goes in both directions with a wildly uneven performance.  I wonder if David Lynch cast her in the original Twin Peaks based on some of her scenes here.  It's also fun seeing Davis, whose voice will be very familiar to anyone who watched TV in the '70s and '80s.  Baldwin has much to do, and earns some emotion at times.  The very last scene is hasty but still works fairly well.   I do wish I had seen this movie at the Skydrome......