As it happens, I translated the Romanian version of this movie's "novelisation", adapted by Greg Cox, so I'm pretty familiar with the details and subtleties of the storyline. As it was already stated here, the script is linear, predictable and formulaic. Correctly built-up, but with no spark. Further, the climax and outcome are messy, superficially constructed and insufficiently justified, leaving in air not a few loose ends...
The commenter Rainmonkey is right: Houdini had no trust and tolerance for spiritualism and the occult in general. It's true that at first, being deeply affected by hid beloved mother's death, he sincerely hoped to contact her through several mediums, and these ones' failings made hum turn frustrated and embittered, thus embarking his crusade of exposing them all as fraud. There were even some notorious instances when, landing as it seems over some genuine psychics, he fabricated fake "evidence" of their alleged "tricks" only to prove them also as crooks. Well, THIS would have been indeed a dramatic ending of our movie here: once Benji starts to have REAL manifestations, Houdini could have tried to rig the experiment as to make it look false - thus, compromising all the human relationship he had built so far with the two Scots... Unfortunately, Grisoni, Ward and Armstrong went for the cheap and well tried beaten trails, with no originality at all...
All in all, a passable entertainment for hairdressers and biology-teachers in junior high - beautiful, sugary and pretty cheap.
The commenter Rainmonkey is right: Houdini had no trust and tolerance for spiritualism and the occult in general. It's true that at first, being deeply affected by hid beloved mother's death, he sincerely hoped to contact her through several mediums, and these ones' failings made hum turn frustrated and embittered, thus embarking his crusade of exposing them all as fraud. There were even some notorious instances when, landing as it seems over some genuine psychics, he fabricated fake "evidence" of their alleged "tricks" only to prove them also as crooks. Well, THIS would have been indeed a dramatic ending of our movie here: once Benji starts to have REAL manifestations, Houdini could have tried to rig the experiment as to make it look false - thus, compromising all the human relationship he had built so far with the two Scots... Unfortunately, Grisoni, Ward and Armstrong went for the cheap and well tried beaten trails, with no originality at all...
All in all, a passable entertainment for hairdressers and biology-teachers in junior high - beautiful, sugary and pretty cheap.