Last movie you watched and your critique of it

[BG-57]

Just found the box set of William Castle movies. He was the P.T. Barnum of filmakers, a master of exploitation and gimmicks to get people to see his movies.

Straight-Jacket

One of Joan Crawford's later movies, somewhere between What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Trog in quality. She plays a woman who commits a crime of passion and is committed. Twenty years later she gets released and comes to live with her grown daughter. It came out the same time as Psycho and has the same writer. Both are lurid tales of murderous insanity, but Hitchcock's was able to transcend the genre while this movie just wallows in it. Nevertheless, Crawford gives a good performance of such a melodramatic and overwrought character.

Meant to be shocking and scary, this has instead aged into good cheesy fun. But no Percepto or Emergo in this one.

EDIT:

Saw another movie in the collection.

Homicidal

Made about the same time as Psycho it also borrows heavily from that much better movie, too much as it turns out. Remember how an otherwise great suspense thriller is ruined at the end by a psychiatrist explaining exactly what's wrong with the killer in a courtroom scene? The same sort of thing happens here. What's worse it's just reiterating stuff that we learned at the 'shocking' climax.

And boy are the characters idiots in this movie! My favorite example is two characters piece together that someone they know committed a horrible murder:

Person 1: I'm calling the police!

Person 2: No wait! We have to make sure first!

I'm not sure if it's comforting or depressing that almost fifty years later there are suspense movies being made that feature characters this stupid. And not one but two scenes where a character wanders into an empty house calling another person's name over and over again.

This is one movie that begs to have the audience talk back to it. Anyways I figured out half of the twist ending, although having seen (SPOILER)The Color of Night may have helped. The gimmick in this was was the Fright Break, where the movie stops right before the climax and gives the audience who are too chicken to finish the movie a chance to make their way to the Coward's Corner to get a refund.