A few days ago, when I watched the Ava Gardner film Tam Lin, I mentioned my affection for the genre known as „psycho-biddy” (or „hagsploitation”). Today I feel like I have to come back to the subject because today’s films are two horror movies from the 70s – which means Ann Sothern was an older actress when she made them. Older actress plus horror film – one can guess where this is going.
The Killing Kind (1973)
The film opens with an upsetting rape scene of a young woman by a group of men. Among them is John Savage, our main character. The other men force him to participate in the rape. Next time we see him it’s two years later and he just left prison. He comes to live with his mother, Ann Sothern, and his return to „the real world” is going to prove very hard (harder even than in Invisible Stripes).
Ann Sothern gives an incredibly campy performance but I really don’t think there was a different possible way to go for her in SUCH a film. She mostly lounges around in big hair and caftans with her cat and doting on her son. The mother-son relation in the film is very Norman Bates, down to literally using several of the same shots (like Savage spying on their new tenant through a peephole). It gets creepier by the minute, at one point she walks into the bathroom as he’s taking a shower and starts taking photos of him.
In the film [SPOILER] it’s the son who is the villain. The viewers are supposed to excuse him for the rape, in which he was, as far we know, an unwilling participant, but here are the things he does later in the film: kills his mother’s cat, assaults the new tenant, pushes the rape victim from the beginning off a cliff and kills her, tortures and kills a rat in front of an old lady, murders his former attorney. And all that before an hour of the movie passes. Still, Ann Sothern definitely has the psycho-biddy vibes about her as she is essentially playing an unhinged, weird older lady. But what I appreciated about the film was that she actually got a moment of true vulnerability and even though we’re watching absolutely terrible people, there is something genuinely touching and sad about her performance towards the end of the film.
Like Tam Lin, The Killing Kind is not really mentioned among the psycho-biddy classics but I absolutely think it could. I wouldn’t say the same about…
The Manitou (1978)
Okay, yes, Ann Sothern IS in this film but so is Tony Curtis. As a tarot reader and a psychic. Yup. His friend/love discovers a tumor on her neck. The doctors find it weird, not like tumors they’re used to at all. In the end it turns out that this is a problem more for someone of Tony’s line of work.
Ann Sothern’s role is very small (she’s the aunt of the sick woman) and not half as juicy as the one in The Killing Kind. She does take a part in a seance they have. But it is not easy to steal the scene in a film including [SPOILER] an ancient Native American shaman growing in a tumor on a woman’s neck. This is much more of a Tony Curtis’s psycho-biddy film than Ann Sothern’s.
I know that the psycho-biddy movies are controversial and considered sexist for basically existing to exploit aging actresses who do not get better parts in Hollywood anymore. But that’s the thing – these films created characters for actresses who were considered has-beens. And those are interesting roles in which they truly can go wild. Maybe for a diva like Joan Crawford it seemed degrading but I unironically love her performances in films likes Strait-Jacket. I think these films deserve more credit than they get.
Swingin' at the Seance 