Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1972)

          An attempt at translating a classic fairy tale into a (somewhat) modern horror picture, the US/UK coproduction Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? falls considerably short of its ambitions, thanks in part to flat cinematography that robs the piece of necessary atmosphere but thanks mostly to an embarrassing star turn by Shelley Winters. With her bulging eyes, flailing movements, and shrill vocalizations, Winters exudes cartoonishness, and not in a good way. There’s no question an oversized performance might have been suitable, given that Winters’s role is a riff on the witch from the fable of Hansel and Gretel, but even an oversized performance requires discipline and vision to manifest coherently. Instead, Winters delivers such amateurish work that it seems she’s doing a blocking run-through rather than presenting a final rendering. Presumably much blame for this fatal flaw gets shared by director Curtis Harrington, whose approach to horror was never distinguished by good taste. One imagines he was after a degree of camp here, as with his preceding Winters collaboration, What’s the Matter With Helen? (1971), but it all just seems so obvious and tacky.
          Set between World Wars in England, the picture concerns Rosie Forrest (Winters), an American former showgirl who is so insane that she keeps the rotting corpse of her dead daughter in the upstairs nursery of her mansion. Every Christmas, Rosie—who also goes by the nickname “Auntie Roo”—opens her home to a group of local orphans, so the movie also introduces viewers to siblings Christopher (Mark Lester) and Katy (Chloe Franks). Through convoluted circumstances, the siblings end up convinced that “Auntie Roo” plans to cook and eat them, as per the Hansel and Gretel story that Christopher recites to Katy one night. Half the picture depicts how the kids develop this belief, and the other half dramatizes various escape attempts once they’re trapped in the mansion with Auntie Roo. Incidental characters adding little to the story include an unscrupulous butler (Michael Gothard) and a drunken medium (Ralph Richardson).
          As penned by a gaggle of writers including Hammer Films regular Jimmy Sangster, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?—released in the U.S. with the slightly abbreviated title Who Slew Auntie Roo?—is colorful but uninvolving, despite the mighty efforts of composer Kenneth V. Jones to add suspense. The appalling nature of Winters’s performance is but one of many shortcomings. While the sets are relatively lavish, shooting the whole picture on soundstages with harsh high-key lighting makes everything feel fake and unthreatening. Lester’s work in the second lead is perfunctory, revealing just how much skill director Carol Reed employed to make Lester seem vigorous in Oliver! (1968). And the logistics of the film’s second half are ridiculous—every would-be suspenseful sequence is predicated on someone doing something idiotic, such as overlooking an obvious warning or, on repeated occasions, rushing into danger to retrieve a teddy bear. The movie is quite dull until the final minutes, when the plot turns perverse by mirroring the gruesome conclusion of the Hansel and Gretel story.

Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?: FUNKY

A Taste of Evil (1971)

          If a barrage of logic-bending plot twists, a handful of familiar actors, and pervasive woman-in-peril atmosphere are sufficient to hold your attention, then you’re the target audience for 1971’s A Taste of Evil, a distasteful but watchable telefilm starring two very different Barbaras, onetime Golden Age star Stanwyck and Peyton Place player Parkins. Rounding out the top-billed cast are Roddy McDowall, Arthur O’Connell, and William Windom, while the behind-the-scenes notables are prolific TV director John Llewellyn Moxey (whose career spanned 1955 to 1991) and writer Jimmy Sangster, best known for the entertainingly lurid Hammer horrors he wrote and/or directed. These folks’ assorted skillsets give A Taste of Evil a smidge more cinematic verve than the average telefilm, even though the picture is most assuredly schlock.
          In a bleak prologue, a 13-year-old girl is sexually assaulted on a sprawling estate. Cut to a decade later, when the now-grown Susan (Parkins) returns home from an overseas mental institution. She’s welcomed by her mother, Miriam (Stanwyck); her alcoholic stepfather, Harold (Windom); and the family’s simple-minded groundskeeper, John (O’Connell). Susan endures several bizarre episodes, seemingly getting chased through woods, discovering a corpse that disappears in the time it takes Susan to get help, and so on. Enter Dr. Lomas (McDowall), whom the family hires to help Susan navigate trauma. Per the Hitchcockian-psychological-thriller playbook, viewers are tasked with guessing whether Susan is unwell or being gaslit—and, if the latter is the case, by whom. To Sangster’s credit, this brief telefilm juggles so many plot elements that it’s possible to overlook major clues, especially because some of the twists, once revealed, are ludicrous. (Incidentally, this was Sangster’s second pass on the same narrative—A Taste of Evil recycles a premise he originated for the 1961 Hammer production Scream of Fear.)
          Stanwyck, ever the consummate professional, does her best to sell this hokum and therefore neither distinguishes nor embarrasses herself. Parkins’s take on PTSD is too glassy-eyed to register emotionally, so she’s more of a delivery device for Sangster’s yarn-spinning than a proper leading lady. And while the film largely squanders McDowall and Windom, O’Connell’s portrayal engenders a bit of empathy. Yet this is ultimately more of a writer’s piece than anything else, so it’s a shame Sangster didn’t bring his A-game; the characterizations are sketchy at best and much of the dialogue is clumsily expositional. Nonetheless, even though everything about A Taste of Evil will quickly evaporate from the viewer’s memory—save perhaps the queasy opening sequence—the flick is just cynical and nasty enough to provide a few kitschy kicks.

A Taste of Evil: FUNKY

Fear in the Night (1972)

          Among the softer offerings from Britain’s Hammer Film Productions—although still quite gruesome in parts—Fear in the Night is an old-fashioned psychological thriller about a young woman who worries that she’s going mad because she repeatedly experiences assaults but cannot convince others that the assaults have occurred. The situation drives her to a paranoid frenzy, leading her to commit violence, so the film’s major narrative question is whether the circumstances are the result of malicious attackers, an odious conspiracy, or something supernatural. Unfortunately, not many viewers will feel invested in solving the central mystery of Fear in the Night, because the movie is far-fetched, repetitive, and slow-moving, problems accentuated by the overly polite and reserved performances of the actors comprising the small cast. As with most of Hammer’s pictures, Fear in the Night is an attractive film thanks to colorful photography and intricate set design, and the film also benefits from a supporting turn by Hammer regular Peter Cushing. Nonetheless, the picture is disposable.

          In contemporary England, 22-year-old Peggy (Judy Geeson) leaves her job as a caregiver in a mental-health facility—where she once received treatment for a nervous breakdown—in order to join her new husband, Robert (Ralph Bates), at the remote boarding school where he teaches. Upon arrival, Peggy meets the school’s kindly old headmaster, Michael (Cuashing), and his sexy younger wife, Molly (Joan Collins), quickly deducing that all is not right. One rather large clue: Despite Michael acting as if school is in session, no students are present. All the while, Peggy suffers assaults—or delusions of assaults—during which she’s grabbed by a one-armed man. Cowritten, produced, and directed by Hammer stalwart Jimmy Sangster, Fear in the Night strives for complexity, instead delivering underwhelming results thanks to silly contrivances and thin characterizations. Still, the movie has a couple of adequate jolts, some imaginative imagery, and an enjoyably overwrought finale during which everything that came before is explained in almost laughable detail.

Fear in the Night: FUNKY

The Legacy (1978)

          Mindless and silly but entertaining in a guilty-pleasure sort of way, this good-looking horror flick features one of those inane plots about an otherwise ordinary person whose lineage designates her the inheritor of a fearsome supernatural power. Katharine Ross, lovely and lightweight as always, plays Margaret, an American summoned to England under the pretense of a lucrative commission for interior-design work. She brings along her sensitive-stud boyfriend, Pete (Sam Elliott), and soon after their arrival in the UK, the couple encounters trouble. Riding a rented motorcycle, they’re run off the road by the town car of Jason Mountolive (John Standing), a super-wealthy English gentleman. He invites them back to his sprawling estate, where it soon becomes clear Margaret was expected—she’s a distant relative of Mountolive, and he’s the person behind her mysterious job offer. In classic horror-movie fashion, Margaret ignores obvious warning signs and sticks around to see what happens.

          What happens, of course, is a serious of bizarre deaths involving the various loathsome relatives Mountolive summons to his estate. Eventually, we realize that the Mountolives are witches, and Margaret is expected to take her place as the clan’s new Satan-worshipping matriarch. Unfortunately, one of the other potential heirs is trying to take out the competition, so Margaret and Pete must dodge a few nasty attempts on their lives. Based on a story by Jimmy Sangster, a veteran of the Hammer Films assembly line, The Legacy gets goofier with each passing scene, to the point that the ending plays more like accidental humor than intentional horror.

          Still, some of the deaths are enjoyably gruesome, like the one in which flame leaps from a fireplace to cook a victim. Director Richard Marquand (Return of the Jedi) makes good use of regal locations, while the British supporting players (including Rocky Horror Picture Show narrator Charles Gray and rock singer Roger Daltrey, of the Who) are lively. And though neither gives a strong performance, Elliott and Ross display believable attraction: They got together offscreen after making this movie, and they’ve been a couple ever since.

The Legacy: FUNKY

The Horror of Frankenstein (1970)

          Even though Hammer Films’ long-running horror series were never big on continuity, it was a bummer whenever series entries were missing their regular stars. Thus, one of the many reasons The Horror of Frankenstein is so disposable is that Ralph Bates plays the titular mad scientist instead of Peter Cushing. It’s not that Bates is bad in the movie—quite to the contrary, he’s got a light touch for deranged perversity that suits Hammer’s campy style. However, the presence of Cushing in Hammer’s other Frankenstein pictures creates the illusion of a series that’s progressing forward, even though the movies are highly repetitive, simply because Cushing’s performance gets more intense in each successive film.

          Conversely, The Horror of Frankenstein represents pure narrative backsliding, because it’s a retread of the series’ first entry, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957); as in that picture, brilliant but reckless young doctor Victor Frankenstein tests his theories about the nature of human life by building a monster from pieces of corpses, only to see the monster escape the confines of Castle Frankenstein and murder unsuspecting villagers in the generic European countryside. Yes, it’s once more into the origin-story breach of Gothic production design, grubby henchmen, heaving bosoms, and over-the-top Technicolor gore.

          The specifics of the plot don’t merit recounting, since the storyline is just a mishmash of things you’ve seen a zillion times before, so only the movie’s few novel touches are worth mentioning. As directed and co-written by Hammer stalwart Jimmy Sangster, The Horror of Frankenstein tries to send up the series at the same time it delivers monster-movie thrills, so Bates gets to riff on the idea of doctor-as-deviant, and his grave robbers of choice are an amiable husband-and-wife team (he cuts up the bodies, she does all the digging). The movie’s monster is a big letdown, however, because he looks more silly than scary. As played by Darth Vader himself, British bodybuilder David Prowse, the monster looks like a Muscle Beach escapee in a Halloween costume, with a cheesy rubber skullcap and gauze-bandage bike shorts. So, while The Horror of Frankenstein has some meager redeeming values, the movie itself is like the monster—a patchwork of used parts artificially animated to something that fleetingly resembles life.

The Horror of Frankenstein: LAME