For Gilbert’s Hale Centre Theatre — whose mission is to do well-worn, Turner Classic Movies-style musicals and comedies — the most Halloween-y of stageplays is Joseph Kesselring’s “Arsenic and Old Lace.” (At least until someone adapts “Village of the Damned” for children’s theater.)

Though history has eaten away at “Arsenic’s” sexagenarian edges, the play remains a farce amplified to a grandly overdriven 11. Its ghastly premise is that a loony pair of aunts have taken to euthanizing lonely old men, while their nephew Teddy believes himself to be our 26th president and spends his time digging the Panama Canal — mass graves for the murdered widowers and withered bachelors — in the aunts’ cellar.

The unwitting subject of the farce is Teddy’s brother Mortimer, a drama critic whose homicidal tendencies are limited to stabbing theater productions with a poison pen. “Arsenic’s” comic greatness comes in setting its rather macabre plot into motion and watching as Mortimer — who should be on cloud nine with his recent engagement to next-door sweetie Elaine — wriggles and writhes and freaks out under the stress of corralling the murderous mess.

What made the 1944 film version so fun was its star, Cary Grant; a smooth operator whose apoplectic, double-take reactions belied his handsome leading-man aura. Hale Centre actor Bret Anderson is no Cary Grant — he's less leading man than solid supporter (as he was in the Hale’s “Heaven Can Wait”). As Mortimer, he’s more a mix of Raul Julia and Sparky, the ASU Sun Devils mascot; there’s an innate worminess to his character that steals the wind from some of the play’s funniest moments.

The Hale’s production, directed by Don Doyle, continues a slow slide away from taut, sparkling and surefire productions in its debut 2003-2004 season and more toward quotidian, energy-sapping stuff like that sloppy “Heaven Can Wait,” with mid-level and minor characters fleshed out by actors of wildly varying quality (much like “Arsenic’s” costuming, which ranges from cheap and ill-fitting to merely adequate). Judged against the efforts of other community theater stagings, the laughs are comparatively few and far between in this “Arsenic,” and the use of a lame stuffed dummy for the play’s dead bodies diminishes the quality of the Hale’s show.

That said, there are a few performances that stand out nicely. The aunts, Alice Bjorklund and Shirley Windhorst, are demented treats, as deadpan and freaky-deeky as the oldies in French 1988 horror film “Les Mémés Cannibales.” And Mesa Community College teacher Gary Stephens is dark and groovy as Mortimer’s other psycho brother Jonathan, who pays a visit to up the farcical ante — he’s all menacing growls and grimaces, cheeks percolating violently on his surgically mangled face.

But the fact that my skin crawled more often than a laugh came up from my belly says plenty about this “Arsenic and Old Lace.” The production, like one of the bodies in the cellar, just feels lifeless.