***SPOILERS**** The very out of shape, with him using a cane, and overweight, between 250 to 275 pounds, Raymond Burr as defense attorney Perry Mason has some workout in this movie dodging falling chandeliers as well as ghosts and goblins in trying to get his client, the former Elliot Ness of the Untouchables, Robert Stack as book publisher Jordan White off on a trumped up murder charge. White was set up to take the fall for the murder of mystery writer David Hall, Matthew Faison, who fell or was pushed to his death off the top of the Briarcliff Hotel outside Denver Colorado.
In fact White who was threatening to sue Hall was one of a number of persons who hated Hall's guts who were invited for dinner at the Briarcliff to talk things over about his new book "The Resort". It's in the book that Hall is to bring out all the dirty laundry about White as well as famed astrologist and psychic Michael Light, Dennis Lipscomb, and Donald Sayer, Jack Bannon, and floozy movie scream queen Maura McGuire, Leigh Taylor-Young. with all four angry as hell in what Hall is planning to do anyone of them had a real good reason to knock him off! But it was only Jordan White who was at the scene of his "downfall", some ten floors to his death from the tower of the Briarcliff Hotel, who was charged with Hall's murder!
As all this is going on at the hotel the place's assistant manager Susan Warrenfield, Kim Delaney, is being driven insane by the strange events that she encounters there. This includes her ghostly grandfather who founder the Briarcliff and has been haunting it ever since some 70 years after his death! Kim who happened to be an eye witness in Hall's death can prove, under hypnosis, that White didn't really push him off the edge, or hotel tower, to is death. That's why the real killer of David Hall is tying to drive her nuts so she wouldn't be a creditable whiteness at White's upcoming murder trial!
****SPOILERS**** Perry for once seems to be up against it in finding Hall's killer and just about gives up on the whole thing as well as his client Jordan White until he checks out the late David Hall's private secretary Andrew Lloyd, Dwight Schultz. Lloyd is something right out of one of the mystery novels that the late David Hall wrote in his weirdness and fanatical devotion to his former boss!
Perry never encountering any one close to someone like Llyod in his entire legal career knows that there's something about him that just isn't quite right but can't put his finger on it! It's not in that he may have murdered Hall but certainly knows who did but doesn't want the world as well as Perry Mason to know who that person is! ***MAJOR SPOILER ALERT***like in one of his murder mystery novels Hall was literately killed off to make room for another character to take his place! Someone conjured up by the very imaginative mind of David Hall himself!
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