Nick Cooper (Jack Jones) is a Pat Boone-like singer, recently divorced, who is trying to make a comeback with a new album. Since he doesn't want to return to his penthouse apartment, which he and his wife shared, his manager, Webster Jones (David Doyle) sets him up at an old English estate run by two odd caretaker.. He doesn't know that his ex-wife Gail (Holly Palance), who was visiting his Penthouse, was savagely stabbed to death by an intruder dressed up as an old lady.
Then, Nick starts hearing a woman's scream at night, which unnerves him. At first he just thinks it's nightmares. He becomes involved with his manager's secretary, Linda.
Harry, a friend of Nick's, offers to go to the penthouse to pick up some of his belongings and comes across the rotted, maggot infested body of Gail. He flees and is killed as soon as he leaves the elevator. Nick's nightmares get worse--and one night even sees a rotted corpse at his bedroom's door. On another night, after he hears screaming, he explores the old house and finds a hatbox that has his ex-wife's head in it. He freaks out. The next thing he knows he's in a hospital, where he's been asleep for five days. The doctor tells him that he has "hysterical exhaustion" and that he hallucinated all of those things. Or was he really being haunted by the ghost of his dead ex-wife, trying to warn him that something was wrong?
THE COMEBACK kept me guessing until the end who the murderer was and even then I was surprised. Basically, everyone, including Nick, had the potential of being the killer.
There's also plenty of gooey corpses and felt at times I was watching a Lucio Fulci movie. Recommended.