Director/Screenplay/Photography – John Derek, Music – Junior Homrich & Randall Tico. Production Company – Crackajack Movie Company.
Bo Derek (Kate Scott), Anthony Quinn (Scott), Don Murray (Winston), Leo Damian (Fausto Garibaldi), Julie Newmar (Angel), Henry Jayasene (Mayor), Mickey Knox (The Pill Man), Victoria Burgoyne (Sabine), Richard Sherman (Dr Frank), Donald Trump (Himself)
Kate lives on a Wyoming ranch with her wealthy and much older husband Scott. He is then diagnosed with a terminal heart condition and chooses to shoot himself. At the funeral, Kate is able to see his ghost. Aided by Scott’s ghost, she travels from the Maldives to Hong Kong where she endeavours to sort out his business affairs. At the same time, he searches for a younger body to take over so that he can return and be with her.
Bo Derek was one of those uniquely 1980s cultural phenomena. Bo and her cornrow hairstyle caught headlines after she was cast in the Blake Edwards’ comedy 10 (1979) as Dudley Moore’s object of fantasy in one scene jogging along a beach in a swimsuit. She appeared on all the magazine covers and was seen as a major new star and was then forgotten five minutes later.
In the surge of fame that came, Bo’s career was managed by her husband John Derek. John was a former actor who had had some minor roles, a couple of dozen in all, from the 1940s through the 1960s, but never enjoyed being an actor and had tried to make it as a director. He directed three nondescript dramatic works before making the film Fantasies in 1974, casting seventeen year-old Mary Collins, a high school student from California. While shooting in Greece, John and Mary (who later began to bill herself as Bo) became involved despite the fact that she was underage and he was married to Linda Evans at the time. They were forced to stay in Europe until Bo turned of age whereupon they married. The film itself was never completed and was seized by the lab but was released in 1981 after Bo became a big name.
Following Bo’s success, John took over managing her career and placed her through a series of films that were all founded on Bo’s desirability and substantially naked body. The first of these was their adult take on Edgar Rice Burroughs in Tarzan the Ape Man (1981), which proved a reasonable success. This was followed by Bolero (1984) and Ghosts Can’t Do It. All of these were widely ridiculed and are regarded as awful. The one virtue they have is that John went to shoot in various picturesque international locales (where he acted as a cinematographer as well as the director) and are lushly photographed.
Ghosts Can’t Do It has a reputation as a Bad Movie as do all of the Bo and John Derek films. It won Worst Film, Worst Director, Worst Actress and Worst Supporting Actor at that year’s Golden Raspberry Awards (if you place any repute by them – I don’t). In 2000, the Golden Raspberries nominated Bo as one of the Worst Actresses of the Century, only for her to be beaten out by Madonna.
There seems to be something autobiographical to the film, which John Derek wrote himself. Derek was just short of fifty (48) when he met the teenage Bo, who was thirty years his junior. When he made Ghosts Can’t Do It, John was 63 years old. You cannot help but read some biographic wish fulfilment fantasy to the film’s plot about an old man feeling his life is past it and looking on as his wife enjoys a renewed lease on life and becomes an international sensation sought by every man she meets, while wishing he could reincarnate in a much younger body. Ghosts Can’t Do It also ended up being the Dereks’ last film and John died in 1998 so it seems an aptly symbolic bookend to his career.
The popularity of Bo Derek was a fluke, one that was about being in the public eye at a certain moment in time. However, when John Derek tried to merchandise that appeal by giving us endless scenes of Bo’s nude body, her lack of anything more than that – such as acting talent – became readily apparent to all audiences, who stayed away from her films in droves. On screen, Bo is a fascinating blank – like a mannequin with a perfect body, a face that never displays anything other than a frosted expression and a vacant smile that never seems to connect at the eyes. Watching her trying to portray grief at her husband’s death is a bizarre sight.
Bo Derek had no acting talent, but that was no excuse for Anthony Quinn, an Academy Award and Golden Globe nominee and winner in films like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Zorba the Greek (1964), who gives what must count as the most embarrassing performance of an otherwise distinguished career. The most bizarre face present in the film is no less than Donald Trump, nearly thirty years before becoming the US President and back when he was a celebrity businessman. Trump has a single scene where he sits across from Bo Derek in a boardroom meeting. He has a couple of lines, including getting to say “Be assured Mrs Scott, that in this room there are knives sharp enough to cut you to the bone and hearts cold enough to eat yours as hors d’oeuvres.” (Trump received a Worst Supporting Actor win at the Golden Raspberries for his role).
Ghosts Can’t Do It is a bizarre mishmash of scenes that don’t really work together. You are not sure if it is an afterlife fantasy where Bo Derek is guided by her ghostly husband, an erotic fantasy with numerous scenes of her undressed or what. The film meanders between international locations – Wyoming, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Hong Kong – and various men who desire Bo without any real plot. (It is a not dissimilar plot to Bolero, which had Bo’s character travelling around lush international locations trying to find the right man to deflower her).
The most bizarrely awful scene is one with Bo hiding in the pool from Mickey Knox wondering if he is going to rape her or kill her – Derek’s lack of emotional investment in the lines make them seem more like failed comedy. It is impossible to see how anybody could have perceived the scene except as comedy but that only makes it seem in even more poor taste.
Trailer here