Fanatic

The story: A young woman named Pat Carroll (Stefanie Powers) pays a courtesy call on Mrs. Trefoile (Tallulah Bankhead), the mother of Pat's dead fiancé. Pat plans to stay one night and be on her way. But Mrs. Trefoile has other ideas. She sees it as her mission to "cleanse" Pat and keep her pure for the day Pat will join her son in the afterlife. To accomplish her mission, Mrs. Trefoile locks Pat in an upper room of her crumbling mansion and preaches to her with a bible in one hand and a gun in the other.

Tallulah! That's all you really need to know about Die! Die! My Darling! Tallulah Bankhead's performance is so over-the-top, so wonderfully demented, so full of campy entertainment that she dominates every aspect of this movie. Stefanie Powers is good, but she and the rest of the cast are completely overshadowed by Tallulah. I just can't imagine anyone else (and that includes the likes of Bette Davis or Joan Crawford who were also part of the aging actress playing a crazed nut in a horror movie) in the role of Mrs. Trefoile - she's that good. I'll go so far as to say that Tallulah's performance in Die! Die! My Darling! is one of my two or three favorite pieces of acting from any horror movie I've seen. Amazing!

Ooh whee, is this thing a doozie. I seen it under the title Die Die My darling, which is a helluva lot more fun than Fanatic. Ole toodle loo Tallulah goes bonkers and torments Stefanie through out the picture, which is all you need to know. Seeing one of the worst thespians in cinema (that would be Miss Powers) being tortured by one of the campiest (that would be Ms. Bankhead) heck, there's your picture right there. Great laughs from beginning to end.

The woman known for giving extravagant parties and answering door bells au natural in her youth plays an old, religious grande dame with no make-up and drab attire. Tallulah Bankhead, in her last screen performance, shows us one more time that she was a consumate actress when given the opportunity to perform. Every moment of hers is precious as she plays a woman that has driven her son from home by her excessive religious fanaticism and is now coping with his death. She is visited by a woman, played by Stephanie Powers, that was engaged to her son. The dialogue and interaction between Miss Bankhead and Miss Powers is wonderful as Bankhead cuts her speech off and hams it up almost in a sedate yet effective manner. Powers soon becomes a forced guest as Tallulah tries and "cleanse" her soul. Watching Tallulah read Biblical passages, sermonize on the evils of the flesh, and gently yet forcefully decay into a state of histrionics is delightful to watch. That woman could act! The rest of the cast is effective with Donald Sutherland in a satisfactory yet forgetable role as a dimwitted servant. Solid direction, claustrophobic settings, and good production values all add up to some good old-fashioned fun!

It's most unfortunate that all the smaller-scaled psychological thrillers Hammer produced during the mid 60's remain somewhat in the shadows of their more grotesque and Grand Guignol featuring horror & Sci-Fi productions (like the Dracula and Frankenstein franchises or the Quatermass trilogy), because there are quite a few of genuine treasures to discover! "Fanatic" a.k.a. "Die! Die! My Darling" is such a wondrous example of an original and highly atmospheric but sadly underrated Hammer thriller. Richard Matheson's screenplay – adapted from a novel by Anne Blaisdell – is terrifically tight & uncomfortably credible, the atmosphere is uncanny throughout and Tallulah Bankhead's performance as the insane religious freak truly stands as one of the greatest in the history of horror cinema. Whilst visiting England with her new lover, all-American girl Pat Carroll plans to pay a visit to Mrs. Trefoile; the mother of her ex-fiancée who died in a car accident before they ever had the chance of getting married. Mrs. Trefoile acts a bit whiny and exaggeratedly religious at first, but still fairly harmless since the visit is meant to be brief and formal. However, Mrs. Trefoile turns into a totally religion-obsessed fruitcake when she learns Pat isn't a virgin anymore and never actually intended to marry her son in the first place! She gets more fanatic than Jesus himself and locks Pat away in the secluded mansion's attic with the intention to cleanse her soul and prepare her to reunite with the son in the afterlife. The concept of this film is simply stupendous, if you ask me, and veteran writer Richard Matheson makes sure that every tiniest possible detail in the script gets covered. There are also some very intriguing sub plots, like the awkward relationships between Mrs. Trefoile's servants and the gradual unfolding of what exactly happened between Pat and Mrs. Trefoile departed son. There are a few clearly noticeable similarities between this film and Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho", which leads to some obvious twists and a fairly predictable finale. But then again, you can't blame the film for this since pretty much every horror movie made after 1960 is influenced by "Psycho" in one way or another. Tallulah (I even love typing her name) Bankhead obviously steals the show in every scene she's in, but the rest of fine cast deserves a word of respect as well, including a young Donald Sutherland as the mentally disabled gardener. Next time you set up a list of favorite Hammer films, make sure you watch "Fanatic" first and I guarantee it will be in there somewhere.

What inspired casting! The libidinous Tallulah Bankhead as a drab, sober, religious zealot! That alone is worth the price of admission. Thanks to Bette and Joan, the 60s era of Grand Guignol brought some of our favorite glossy "middle-aged" legends back to the somewhat less glossy cinematic limelight. Debbie Reynolds, Shelley Winters, Olivia de Havilland, Geraldine Page, Agnes Moorehead, and Ruth Gordon all took the Gothic plunge. The prerequisites? Simple. Look like hell and act like a mad bull in a china shop. So why not grand ol' Tallulah, dahling?

Here, the "Alabama Foghorn," as Fred Mertz once called her when she guested (hilariously so) on an episode of "The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour," is called upon to play the prim, tight-lipped Mrs. Trefoile, a wacko bible-thumper whose only child died a short time before. When her dead son's fiancee (Stefanie Powers) comes to pay an overdue visit out of respect, she makes a big whoops and tells the old lady that she is about to marry another man. And now the fun begins...

Urged on by her Maker (of course) to exorcise the young girl's demons and restore her purity (she wears that blasphemous red lipstick, you see) and, oh yeah, also to punish her (of course)for her mortal wickedness and ultimate betrayal to her dead son, the old lady (of course) imprisons the young damsel in her medieval-styled lair for a week's worth of (naturally) bible verse and repentance. But then the old crackpot decides she'd be better served if she (you know) takes it up a notch and makes her (of course) a sacrificial lamb instead. See, Trefoile finds out that the girl is still a virgin so (of course) if the girl's still a virgin, her soul can still be (you know) saved and, at the same time, she can be reunited with Trafoile's dead son in heaven, which better serves his memory. You know, kill, I mean save, two birds with one stone.

Seeing Bankhead cavorting around as a dowdy, highly repressed teetotaler while spewing passages from Revelations is an admittedly sinful pleasure. What's even better is that the old girl gets away with it. As bizarre and campy as one could hope for, Bankhead's Mrs. Trefoile is still all prickly seriousness and deadly menace, possessing a convincingly firm, fervent gait. She doesn't really play the joke. Moreover, she manages to slightly stroke audience sympathy with human shadings of loneliness and utter despair. The atmosphere is appropriately claustrophobic and suspense is built up expertly too, with every Bankhead entrance punctuated by creepy, stringy harpsichord music.

Fun too is watching Bankhead's Addams Family-like household run amok, especially Donald Sutherland as a mute, dim-witted servant -- a role I'm sure he'd love to erase permanently from his resume. Poor bruised and bloodied Stefanie Powers does yeoman's work here, gaining our sympathy from the onset and making a wonderfully feisty "straight man" to the Bankhead histrionics.

And just wait until the skeletons come out of the closet. Like you knew they would! Bankhead's final curtain in the flick is a great wallow. And speaking of final curtains, this was regrettably her last feature film.