But we haven't covered the bizarre aftershocks resulting from the runaway success of "Baby Jane"......the rise of an insane new genre that burned briefly through the 1960's.....Granny Horror. Aging, iconic actresses from the Golden Age of studio filmmaking stepped in front of the cameras once again.......to scream, shriek, wield axes, guns and all sorts of blunt instruments, and basically scare the living hell out of us. And the films? Low budget doozies, some of which became instant camp classics the day they were released....
Let's start the heads rolling with Joan Crawford......as she graced these gems with her presence...
Strait-Jacket (1964) Joan keeps a clear head, but relieves other people of their heads as she plays an ax-murderess released from the funny farm after 20 years. Her cure might not have kicked in, since folks' noggins start coming loose again. Written by "Psycho"s Robert Block, it was yet another exploitation sideshow slapped together by that irrepressible carnival barker-huckster William Castle.("13 Ghosts", "House On Haunted Hill") Castle loved shlocky physical gimmicks, like putting joy buzzers under the theater seats or floating skeletons on wires into the audience. He didn't need that stuff for this movie, which opens with the spectacle of Joan playing herself as a young woman, complete with 1940's fright wig. But you gotta love Castle's ad campaign, with teaser newspaper ads reading...."10 more Chopping Days til Strait-Jacket"!
I Saw What You Did (1965) More William Castle madness.....with Joan cozying up to a wife-murderer (John Ireland) who's randomly harassed by two teenage girls making prank phone calls. Which doesn't work out well for either Joan or the reckless teens. Not much for Joan to do here and it lacks the usual loony oomph of a Castle production.....
Berserk (1967) London's calling....and Joan hops over the pond to wallow in British blood and gore. She's a circus owner whose featured performers are all dying in horrific "accidents". (You can almost imagine these yourself without even seeing the movie.....or you could view an earlier British effort, "Circus Of Horrors" which had all the expected calamities in high wire acts, lion taming and knife throwing...) As in "Strait Jacket", Joan struggles with a contentious relationship with her young daughter (talk about art imitating life).....and both movies offer, more or less, the same twist ending......
Trog (1970) Joan's final film and the very bottom of the barrel......with Joan as a scientist who digs out a prehistoric troglodyte who's still got plenty of snarl left in him. She probably had an easier time wrangling the trog than she did coping with Bette Davis. Trog himself is a shambling stunt man wearing a monkey-head swiped off the prop shelves of "2001:A Space Oddysey".
But poor Joan wasn't alone on the careening horror bobsled for previously retired divas......soon joining in....
Lady In A Cage (1964) This nasty little piece of dementia was planned for Joan Crawford, but fell into the hands of Olivia de Havilland. The title makes it all terribly clear......Olivia's a rich invalid trapped in a faulty ornate elevator in her mansion. And in walks a host of scummy home invaders led by the very young James Caan. Then it's 90 minutes of random cruelty and violence til the wrap up, with Caan's fate serving as the movie's extra-squishy high point.....!
Die! Die! My Darling! (1965) One of the BQ's favorite movie titles, running a close second to "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" Naive young Stephanie Powers, in the great tradition of all horror movie ingenues, makes the mistake of stopping in to console her late finance's mother, played, in all her gravel-voiced glory by Tallulah Bankhead. As the terrifiying 'Mrs. Trefoile', Bankhead creates one of the most formidable gargoyles in the all of Granny Horror. A former actress turned religious fanatic, Mrs. T. is like Baby Jane with a bible. And the isolated country home she skulks around in comes fully staffed with creepy servant-minions, including a slack-jawed hulk played by a young Donald Sutherland.....
The Witches (1966) Joan Fontaine, Olivia de Havilland's long estranged younger sister, also boards the British horror bus, expertly driven by the Hammer company (more about them in a second). Joan's a schoolteacher whose last posting in Africa didn't go well.....a witch doctor gave her the full heebie-jeebies treatment. Retreating to a quiet English village (or so it seems...heh,heh, heh) Joan doesn't heal well from her witch doctor PTSD.......since the quaint little hamlet hides a whole nest of devil worshippers prepping for their next sacrificial virgin wingding. Nicely done chills with a top-of-the-line cast headed by Kay Walsh and Alec McCowen.....
And by all means, let's not forget the lady whose eye-popping theatrics and operatic madness gave birth to these films.....
The Nanny (1965) Bette Davis enjoyed much better luck than Joan Crawford in moving into British horror, since Bette did her scarifyin' for Hammer, the masters of making low budget horror look exquisitely classy. The movie cleverly flips the "Bad Seed" premise inside out......who's really a psychotic killer here, the bratty little boy accused of drowning his sister or his crisply efficient English nanny played with quiet menace by Davis? Far be it from the BQ to spoil the fun of anyone who hasn't encountered this film yet......let's just say that the movie does try hard for a while not to tip its hand. The kid's really creepy and as for Davis.....well, nobody in their right mind would accept a spoonful of sugar from her.....
We didn't bother rating these movies individually......you either embrace this odd genre or run screaming in the other direction. Overall, we'll generously splatter 3 stars (***)over the Granny Horror movies.....a once-in-a-generation anomaly that flared briefly like a comet that only visits earth every hundred years or so. Who knew that Joan Crawford swung a meaner ax than Paul Bunyon?
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