“You’ve had such rotten luck with your housekeepers, Aunt Claire.”

Drake’s rating: Ah, the fresh scent of pine

Drake’s review: Quite a few of us Mutants give the ‘70s a hard time, and with good reason. It was a strange decade that introduced us to movies about giant sharks, custom vans, and a laser sword-wielding hero who was having impure thoughts about his sister. But as weird as the ‘70s got, it was the previous decade that popularized that strange genre of cinema that became known as the psycho-biddy film.

Since Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? was an unexpected hit for both Seven Arts Productions and stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, it didn’t take long for producers to sign up aging* starlets to indulge in onscreen histrionics to the delight of receptive audiences across the country. Titles like Berserk, I Saw What You Did, and Die! Die! My Darling! lit up the theater marquees and allowed several actresses who had fallen out of the Hollywood A-list to once again see their names at the top of the bill.

Robert Aldrich, who had directed and produced both Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and the Bette Davis follow-up Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, went to the well a third time in 1969 with Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice? Giving the director’s chair over to Bernard Girard (who was later replaced by Lee Katzin) and lacking both Davis and Crawford, Aldrich turned to Geraldine Page to star as Claire Marrable, a widow who finds out that her husband has left her penniless. Moving to a desert bungalow outside of Tuscon, AZ in order to be closer to her nephew, Claire hires a live-in housekeeper and then swiftly murders the woman, burying her beneath a pine tree in her yard. It’s not long before Claire has a neat row of pine trees and a nice little nest egg for herself, courtesy of more ill-fated housekeepers.

But then Alice arrives, and since she’s played by Ruth Gordon (who would cement her status as a cult icon in 1971’s Harold and Maude) you know she’s not going to be just another pine tree in the yard. Alice realizes something is amiss at Casa Loca, and she seems to have a connection to one of the missing women. She might be old and seemingly frail, but Alice is nothing if not tenacious, and she’s determined to find out just what Claire’s been up to.

So begins the cat-and-mouse game between the two, as Alice surreptitiously sneaks around the house searching for clues and Claire begins to grow ever more wary of her new housekeeper. While Gordon plays her part straight for the most part, Page chews the scenery for all she’s worth. Wild-eyed at the best of times, Claire indulges in her crimes with bloody glee, wielding axe and shovel with murderous intent and a disturbing giggle. Whatever Claire was before her husband’s death, she is now a cold-blooded killer capable of disposing of anyone who gets between her and her ill-gotten gains.

Now if only she could get rid of that pesky dog that keeps trying to dig up her pine trees…

Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice? didn’t do the business that Aldrich’s previous forays into psycho-biddydom had, and he canceled his plans for a fourth flick. That’s a shame, as this is a rollicking suspense flick that happily wades hip-deep into B-movie camp and provides a fun showcase for a pair of fine actresses. Never taking itself too seriously, Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice? might lack the sheer star power of its predecessors, but it’s nevertheless a great entry into the psycho-biddy annals.

It also gives one a wariness of any house in the neighborhood sporting a row of pine trees**.

*And by aging, I of course I’m talking solely about Hollywood’s definition of the term. Bette Davis was 54 when Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? hit the big screen, and Joan Crawford was 56. Middle-aged, sure, but hardly old.

**What? I only have two! And they were here when I moved in! Honest!

Intermission!

• Geraldine Page was only 44 when Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice? was filmed, but was outfitted with a stark grey wig and some severe makeup to artificially age her character.
• The soundtrack on this disconcertingly made me think of Star Trek. I looked up the film’s composer, Gerald Fried and sure enough, among other things he composed the music for four episodes of the original series. It’s an odd mix of music and movie, but that only adds to the campiness of this flick.
• Seven Arts Productions started life as a production company, but in 1967 bought the controlling interest in Warner Bros. Warner Bros.-Seven Arts only lasted two years, however, as the Kinney National Company acquired it in 1969.
• The psycho-biddy genre never really went away. It may have had its most famous entry since the ‘60s with 1990’s Misery, but it found success even more recently with Ti West’s X in 2022.
• Hmmm. I wonder if I can review X. Sure, it’s about people making a [CENSORED] movie, but it’s not a [CENSORED] movie in and of itself. Also, it’s set in the ‘70s and it has a van. There aren’t any laser swords, though.