Let's Kill Uncle (1966)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

A Masterpiece!

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Great energy created through well constructed juxtaposition gets this film revved up from the get-go. A car crash is followed by children nearly fist-fighting... then cross-cutting to sharks feeding. Castle uses some good depth of field on the ship creating a sense of transportation (restlessness is a key theme in the film). The staging/blocking is sound creating a sense for the relationships of the characters and their motivation. The direction is attuned for spectator identification and Castle's spooks have heightened effectiveness as a result. The dialogue has an honesty and naturalism reminiscent of Castle's The Americano. Then the titular uncle arrives and good acting all around keeps the film engaging and entertaining. The plot contrivances have to be overlooked simply for the fact that Let's Kill Uncle is a William Castle film! This is one of his better "screwball horror" films which followed his gimmick horror films.

This is one of the weirdest films I've ever run into. Not great or even good, but totally strange.Young Pat Cardi's multi-millionaire father dies in a car crash and he inherits the wealth, but has to go to live with his uncle Nigel Green, a most mysterious individual who lives on an island that sharks abound in the waters around. It wasn't always so, at one time the island wherever it is was a tourist spot. But the multiplying sharks did drive the tourists away and then the natives of the island whose living depended on the tourist trade.Cardi's whose wealth and new position even merits a policeman accompanying him in the person of Robert Pickering. Also on the ship is Mary Badham, a young girl going to live with an aunt on the island played by Linda Lawson.These two have not had Beaver Cleaver childhoods and they fight a lot, but are drawn to each other, especially when it turns out that Nigel Green is trying to kill Cardi and grab his brother's money for himself. When he doesn't succeed the kids decide to do it to him before he does it to them.Directed by horror specialist William Castle, Let's Kill Uncle marked the nadir of his career. It's a black comedy that simply doesn't work. In fact the two kids are so annoying and obnoxious one is wishing Green actually did kill them. As for Nigel Green he saunters through the whole procedure with a twinkle in his eye and the satisfied look of a man knowing paycheck had already cleared the bank.No frights in this film even with the menacing sharks who even turn up in the swimming pool. Just a lot of guffaws.

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.

Although I haven't seen the movie in well over twenty years, I distinctly remember some classically original scenes--a shark circling in the swimming pool is at the forefront of these scenes.There is a charm to the movie hard to put one's finger on. Perhaps it's a film that begs (and succeeds) to bring out the adventurous core-child in each of us.The problem: I've been searching for this movie for over twenty years. If I can buy a copy from someone, or if someone knows when it might be aired....PLEASE let me know.Thank you, Jay