If you’ve ever wondered what The Exorcist would look like after being left in a swamp for a decade, then baked under the Florida sun next to a popcorn machine, Ruby is your answer. This supernatural mobster-meets-demonic-possession oddity takes place in 1951 but feels like it was filmed in a time warp where pacing, tone, and logic all went to die.
A Gun Moll, a Drive-In, and a Ghost With Nothing Better to Do
Piper Laurie plays Ruby Claire, a former gun moll who now runs a drive-in theater staffed entirely by ex-mobsters—because apparently the Florida job market in 1951 was just that weird. Sixteen years earlier, her gangster boyfriend Nicky Rocco got whacked in a swamp and swore vengeance with his dying breath. Now his ghost is back, and instead of doing anything cinematic like blowing up cars or dragging people into the Everglades, he settles for… haunting a movie theater and knocking off employees like he’s running a supernatural HR department.
Horror in Neutral Gear
Curtis Harrington’s direction ambles along like it’s afraid to break a sweat. Scenes that should be scary—like poltergeist activity in the projection booth—come off more like a maintenance problem. By the time bodies start turning up hanging from trees, the tone is still so casual you half expect Ruby to break out a lemonade stand. The ghost kills people, sure, but in such lazy, uncreative ways it feels less like vengeance and more like he’s trying to get through a grocery list.
Piper Laurie Deserves Better
Laurie spends most of the film in glamorous outfits, swanning around the drive-in like she’s auditioning for Sunset Boulevard 2: The Swamp Years. When she finally has to deal with her mute, possibly possessed daughter Leslie speaking in Nicky’s voice, she reacts with the kind of mild annoyance you’d give a telemarketer calling at dinnertime. By the time the film wants us to believe she’s making some grand emotional confession about loyalty to Nicky, it’s hard not to picture Laurie mentally calculating how many scenes were left before she could cash the check.
Mobsters, Eyeballs, and Bad Ideas
The supporting cast is a rogues’ gallery of character actors playing ex-mobsters who now sell snacks and tickets. One is blind and wheelchair-bound, another is just there to die in mildly creative ways, and all of them exist mainly to pad out the runtime. Ruby even keeps a jar of eyeballs as a romantic gesture to her dead lover—which sounds far more interesting than it plays on screen. It’s the kind of plot detail that could have been campy gold, but here it’s tossed in and forgotten like yesterday’s popcorn.
The Climax: Now With Extra Skeleton
The big finale takes place in the swamp, where Ruby walks hand-in-hand with Nicky’s ghost before his skeleton drags her underwater. It should be eerie. It should be unsettling. Instead, it looks like two actors trying to improvise interpretive dance in waist-deep water while the crew yells at them to wrap it up before losing daylight.
Final Verdict: All Soggy, No Scary
Ruby is the kind of movie that sounds amazing when you read the plot synopsis—gangster ghost revenge! Drive-in theater setting! Piper Laurie!—but dies a slow, soggy death in execution. It’s neither scary nor campy enough to be memorable, just a damp, meandering curiosity with a few fun moments buried under heaps of missed opportunity.
