La strana signora della grande casa

Once one of the queens of melodrama ("Peyton place " "imitation of life") and of the film noir ("the postman always rings twice") , Lana Turner whose career had waned in the sixties , followed Bette Davis' and Joan Crawford 's footsteps :she tried her hand at horror movies ;so you get what you expect: a festival of camp .

The most memorable scenes are to be found at the beginning and at the end of the film:the Xmas night , enhanced by carrols , in the gloomy room where Davis finds his presents, while the sound of mechanical soldiers is heard ; then his final revenge "I said : lap up!"

The screenplay is disjointed, the flashbacks -which feature Trevor howard,all the same!)are badly introduced in the story ; the atmosphere is rather disturbing , with the principal and her beloved cats that seem to be her real family , for she has her way to destroy her human one. An aging Turner's face adds to the lugubrious Gothic house .

A note about Olga-Georges Picot who plays Monique :in the late sixties/early seventies,this polyglot embassador's daughter was one of the most promising French actresses and played opposite very famous partners ; but her physique and her good looks went against her ,and by the mid-seventies ,she was relegated to soft porn material : in "persecution" ,her role already "predated" her future career:despondent about her failed career,she threw herself out of a window at the age of 57.

I saw this as Graveyard in a mediocre copy. The thing is producer Kevin Francis, I'm told, won't allow these movie he produced to be released now. Turner is good so it Bates, but the ending confrontation really goes on and on and drags out so much that when the very appropriate ending comes it lacks the impact it should have. Perhaps part of the problem is the lack of music and too talky a finale. The story is more disturbing than scary but the beginning is really the best part, then after an unexpected kill the movie becomes slower and less interesting. Deserves to be seen and seen in better form. Of the three horror films Francis produced I'd put this in the middle, The Ghoul is worse, the final Werewolf film is the least original but the most satisfying.

Also shown under the titles THE GRAVEYARD and THE TERROR OF SHEBA, this Gothic British horror movie stars Lana Turner as a maniacal mother who delights in making life miserable for her spineless son(Ralph Bates) who is slowly, but surly, tiring of his deranged mama and her wicked, wicked ways. With her beautiful face, every hair in place, her fashionable costumes, and her exquisite jewelry, Lana Turner, at age 53, is still the very essence of Hollywood glamour. But this is 1974 we're talking about, and her name didn't have the same sparkling effect on the box-office that it had in say 1947, so the film went mostly unnoticed by the movie-going public. The picture itself is a dreary and rather ghoulish retread of familiar BABY JANE-ish high jinks. But Turner has fun with her looneytunes character, and makes this otherwise derivative little film quite watchable. Lana personally regarded this as her worst performance, but she isn't bad at all. Actually she's quite good. I'm convinced she did more with the role than anybody else could have. In fact, she won the Best Actress Award at Spain's Festival of Horror Movies. I strongly recommend this film to her fans who should find it quite interesting to see Turner playing the kind of merciless, blood-curdling psychobitch that Bette Davis and Joan Crawford played in their Scream Queen days.

It's so sad to watch Lana Turner who made amazing drama and romance to do a horror movie at England in twlight's career, as l'd read somewhere that the most of critics deemed the 70' as lost decade to the cinema, l don't agree certainly but they had some reasons to said that, like this movie that is so unexplainable and disturbing, Lana plays a machiavellian mother who mishandle your son in extreme way of without regret, acceptable plot although it wasn't to every taste indeed, while the results in final could be understood as insane is funny to see a horrible revenge, probable the audience will be glad to see it!! the official DVD released here in Brazil's market was a bad copy, needs a upmost new restoration!!

Resume:

First watch: 2018 / How many: 1 / Source: DVD / Rating: 6.25

If you like seeing sick, narcissistic folks destroying each other, then I have a film for you..."Persecution"! It's a movie about two very sick people and the twisted relationship they have together.

The story begins with a young boy drowning his mother's beloved cat in a bowl of milk! Apparently, the cat was loved more than he was and he was sick of it and killed the poor animal. Animal lovers might not want to see this as it's pretty realistic.

Many years pass. The boy has grown up and is married with a baby. For some inexplicable reason, he brings his family to see his mother...a cold, uncaring manipulator...full of snide comments but no love whatsoever. Soon she hires a sexy new maid and you realize the 'maid' is basically a prostitute coming to destroy the son's marriage. But before this can happen, one of his mother's cats suphocates the baby...and this, combined with the seduction lead to very bad things...at which point the son snaps and spends the rest of the movie tormenting his soulless mother.

While the film is well made and Lana Turner is excellent as the evil mother (in fact, it's one of her best performances), you might wonder WHY...why would anyone want to watch it? After all, it's a very unpleasant film...though an odd and intriguing character study of the evil mom and her adult son. In fact, if the film was intended to be a prequel to "Psycho", it would have fit very nicely into the Hitchcock film...showing what led to Norman becoming such a dangerous psychopath.

By the way, there is a goof that made me laugh. The son digs up a grave and the body is a skeleton...yet the bones of the hand are fully articulated...like a college model. Real human skeletons completely fall apart as there is nothing to hold these bones together.