From Novel to Film pt. 38: The Secret of Terror Castle

As a child, my favorite reading was Marvel Comics. In close second: the Three Investigators series of books.

The frontispiece for the hardcovers.

This won’t be a long post. Most of the story is explaining the story, and there are enough sites out there already doing that. Quick version: it was a series of boy adventure detective stories from fifty-ish years ago that had the interesting wrinkle of Alfred Hitchcock introducing the stories and playing himself in at least one chapter. Until he died and the estate re-shuffled its licensing and tie-in-media needs. At that point “Hector Sebastian,” a fictional mystery writer, stepped in. At that point, the Hitch profile in the corner changed to a keyhole, so you always had to look for which one (at the library) - I was a stickler for the originals.

When my family moved in 1986 the books became scarce. Not sure why. This was before the days of lending libraries, yadda yadda, any/all of the original run of books I had run a pretty penny on eBay these days, yadda yadda - same old song and dance. In my own experience, if you find a T3I fan, usually you find someone who spent time outside the US in their childhood sometime in the 70s or 80s. Usually I say - I know of at least one exception. 

Anyway. On to:

THE NOVEL

Jupiter Jones has won a contest which allows him the use of a Rolls Royce with driver. He and his friends – Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews, the muscle and the microfiche-reader – bluff their way into Alfred Hitchcock’s office and convince the director to hire their juvenile detective agency to find a haunted house for his announced filmmaking needs in the paper. Jupe has just the house: Terror Castle, once the home of a silent actor rumored to be haunting the premises.

The Three Investigators have several motifs – leaving question marks around them, Jupiter’s uncle’s junkyard (with its two Bavarian handymen who, like the English Rolls chauffer, complete the odd aristocratic fantasy: boy-genius-heir to a junk empire), a “ghost to ghost hook-up” which involved the primitive use of dozens of dial-phones working in unison – and even more in subsequent books.

Written by Robert Arthur with interior illustrations by Harry Kane, Terror Castle casts the mold for the series to come. 

As a kid this held my imagination start to finish. This was the age of read a chapter before you go to sleep and try to sneak one more with a flashlight under the bed. 

Subsequent re-reads of all the others – I think you get the sense from all these posts that I’m a bit of a collector, a bit of a re-vister – never connected me to the childhood magic I got from the others: except for this one. Well, a couple of others, but this is the big one. The Secret of Terror Castle IS the Three Investigators, at least the mk-1 version. I doubt any of my kids will want to read them or even know what to make of them if they did. There’s a you-had-to-be-there vibe to a lot of it. If any of them were ever going to land, it would be this one. 

THE FILM

(2009)

I’ll give the film (a South African-German co-production; the books always sold well in both markets) credit for making sincere attempts to reach fans of the mk-1 set-up. Rocky Beach looks pretty cool. They got rid of Hans and Konrad and Alfred Hitchcock, but Worthington's here, and Aunt Mathilda and Uncle Titus (who get a German accent to sort of compensate for the loss of Hans and Konrad, I guess.) A few other things here and there seem like genuine efforts to reach across the years, and it'd be bad manners not to appreciate them. The casting of the kids was pretty good if you accept that the strokes are both broad and – in the case of Jupiter – fairly loose/ outside the lines.

Plotwise, well, they keep the haunted house. And it looks pretty cool.  

But everything else is invented for the film.

And how! A romance for Bob, a connecting plot to Jupiter's parents, you name it. 

Plus plenty of updated (but already dated) tech and tactics to replace their hopelessly analog aesthetic.

"Get out of my house."

And more. I can’t fault them for any of the attempts. The result is… unsuccessful? Harmless? Actually kind of fun? Sort of lame? Not sure. Probably some of all that. I watched both of the attempts with this cast, and I kind of liked The Skeleton Isle. And I kind of liked this one, too, even while not enjoying either, really. I mostly rolled my eyes. It’s complicated.

It could be as simple as part of me really thrills seeing a familiar Three Investigators on screen. Even with all the changes. Most of me, though, thinks it was a nice attempt and a pretty slick production, but ultimately unsuccessful, as an adaptation or as a franchise-starter. 

There’s a bit towards the beginning that cracked me up. It works to establish both the edgier Jupiter Jones and the more paramilitary T3I, but as the beginning of the movie, it's a start-and-stopper. A planned surprise birthday party for Jupiter falls flat because Jupiter hates birthdays. (His parents, duh!) Oh okay, everyone kind of shuffles off. But wait, who's the clown? It's a plant? Attack pattern delta! Okay, he got away. That was weird, right? What was he after? A very conspicuous clue to the whole mystery? Like the clue/ mystery was here the whole time, it just took some clown to come try to get it? Worked for The Goonies, I guess.

Wait, is that Hans and Konrad? It's got be. I guess they are here. 
I don't see them at the IMDB, though.

~

This will be the last From Novel to Film entry. I didn’t plan this, I swear, but I’ve somehow ended on my literal first favorite book. Tiens! I suppose it could have been Bunnicula. Or Superfudge. And there’s a movie, too… hmmm… for both. Should I… ? Nah, better stick with that plan. 

Thanks for reading, folks.

Not mine, alas.