SOMETIMES AUNT MARTHA DOES DREADFUL THINGS (1971, d. Thomas Casey)
It’s turkey time, Scumbags! Gobble gobble!
Since Thanksgiving is nearly upon us, we’re going to be discussing movies about weird families this week. Now, I know what you’re thinking: you wanna talk about weird families, just look at the gaggle of miscreants I’m gonna have to sit around the table with in a few days! They all belong in the gosh darn loony bin! Family isn’t a word, it’s a sentence, buster! Well, sure, maybe your grandpa constantly misgenders you despite the fact that you are not transgender, and that one uncle thinks that gay people are a Jewish conspiracy, and your little cousin is always knocking over the gravy boat with his incessant dabbing, but hey, look on the bright side: at least your family doesn’t consist of a burned out hippie man-child and a cross-dressing murderous lunatic on the run from the law, right? On second thought, that sounds slightly better than all that “gay people are a Jewish conspiracy” business, but let’s move on, because holy frijoles, we need to discuss 1971’s Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things.
We open in Miami. Scary already, right?! Two small time crooks, Stanley and Paul, are on the run. Turns out, they’re wanted in Baltimore for robbery and murder, so they’re laying low down south. Problem is, things aren’t going so well. Stanley, as we learn, is driving around town in this absurd van that looks like a cross between Ken Kesey’s bus and the Mystery Machine, he’s always getting loaded, and he’s always bringing “far out chicks” back to the house. He also likes eating mini donuts out of a cigar box. Paul, meanwhile, is disguising himself as the titular Aunt Martha, because apparently two men living together in suburban Florida is much stranger than one man and what is obviously a man in a Halloween fright wig and elderly maid clothes living together. Oh, and Paul is extremely bitchy, prone to angry outbursts, and has a nasty habit of butchering the “far out chicks” that Stanley is always bringing home.
If nothing else, this movie is a harrowing portrayal of a toxic, codependent relationship. It is heavily implied, though never quite said out loud, that Stanley and Paul are lovers, but they act like a contentious couple throughout the entire film. Have you ever been around a couple where one is always flying off the handle at the smallest slights and just mercilessly berating their partner, who is immune to the endless haranguing by now, so they just act up out of spite? I have, and it is super fucking awkward, and this movie captures that dynamic perfectly. Paul is a massive control freak, while Stanley just wants to live the groovy life and let his freak flag fly, maaaaaan. Except when it comes to the aforementioned “far out chicks,” that is: whenever one tries to initiate the nasty with him, Stanley flips out and screams for Paul to come get them away from him. Did we mention that Stanley and Paul even sleep in the same bed?
Most of Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things follows this general pattern: Stanley does something that annoys Paul, Paul makes a big angry scene, which only eggs Stanley on more. Thrown into the mix are their nosy neighbor from across the street, who is pregnant and has a daughter who is training to become a nurse. This nosy neighbor somehow never realizes that Aunt Martha is a man in drag, and Stanley develops a crush on the nurse daughter, probably because she’s the only girl in the movie who isn’t trying to ride the baloney pony. We also occasionally check in with a local pizza parlor, because why not. And then there’s the lowlife junky who has followed them all the way from Baltimore, who wants to steal the diamonds and jewels that they’ve got, or something, this plot point never really quite pans out.
Things escalate to the point where the last half hour or so of the film just descends into insane violence. The nosy neighbor insists on making Stanley a cake for his birthday. While Stanley and Paul are gone, the junky goes rifling through the house, and eventually finds the diamonds and jewels. He gets into a scuffle with Stanley and Paul, and as he’s running out of their house, he knocks over the nosy neighbor, who is on her way to deliver the cake, and somehow this mortally wounds her? Paul goes after the junky, eventually gunning him down on a golf course, because Florida. Meanwhile, Stanley takes the nosy neighbor back to the shack behind their house. She’s somehow dying from being knocked over, and before she dies, she whispers, “save my baby.” That’s when Stanley pulls out Paul’s favorite stabbing knife, and we are treated to the most twisted c-section this side of Prometheus. Got DAMN!!!
Paul decides that it’s time for them to flee, but Stanley is getting tired of running. Nevertheless, Paul bullies Stanley into leaving the stillborn baby on nursing student’s doorstep, ditching the Ken Kesey Mystery Machine, and they hide out at an abandoned movie studio. It is at this point that Stanley is like, seriously, I’ve had enough, I don’t care if I go to jail, I can’t run anymore. Paul is decidedly not enthused by Stanley’s decision, and is like, you fool, you’re going to rat me out if you get caught, and you’re not taking me down with you! To which Stanley is like, c’mon man, I was the one who murdered and robbed that lady, they only want me. Which prompts Paul to go into full on super villain mode and be like, you shithead, I murdered that woman and gaslighted you into thinking that you did, because you’re high as fuck all of the time, it was a perfect crime, so what if I stole it from the ending of Multiple Maniacs! They have a very long, very slow game of cat and mouse (all of the “action” scenes in this movie are very long and very slow, just FYI), and then the police show up. Stanley is like, hey, my pseudo boyfriend is holding me hostage in here, OMG haaaaaaalp! So Paul has no choice but to stab Stanley a whole bunch of times until he’s been thoroughly murderized, but immediately regrets it. How do we know this? Because this pair’s relationship has progressed to the point where Paul cannot even live without Stanley, so as the cops are busting into the abandoned movie studio, Paul shoots himself in the head and dies. Now they can lay next to each other like latent homosexuals all the time, because they’re corpses.
Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things is a wonderful time capsule that gives you a peak back into a very important time in exploitation filmmaking. It will be no surprise to you, given the state’s down and dirty reputation today, that Florida was a hotbed for weirdos with shitty cameras and sick imaginations back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Florida’s underground film industry gave us the likes of Doris Wishman, Dave Friedman, and Herschell Gordon Lewis, for chryssakes! This is a prime example of one of that era’s oddball, crackpot roughies, where the sun looks like it has jaundice, the tacky interiors were clearly shot on a soundstage somewhere, and the music seems like it was lifted straight out of I Dream of Jeannie, making for a hilariously incongruous counterpart to the always dirty, sometimes psychedelic imagery it is meant to accompany.
And then there are the performances. Abe Zwick is an absolute hoot as Paul. He vigorously chews the scenery, giving every bit of spewed invective a Shakespearian verve. I started to write down his most memorable line deliveries (“that…BASTARD!”), but soon realized I would be quoting all of his lines from the film. The best way to sum up his performance here is to say, imagine Dudley Manlove starring in a John Waters movie, but even more demented. Wayne Crawford (who is billed here as “Scott Lawrence” and would go on to produce Valley Girl and Night of the Comet) does an admirable job as Stanley, really nailing the balance between his debauched hippie ways and his childlike insouciance. Simply put, these guys bring real pathos to these cartoonish campy roles, and if they weren’t starring in this thing, it would be pretty much unwatchable. As it is, the film is sluggishly paced, with scenes that run on for far too long, not to mention various scenes that play out in near total darkness. At 95 minutes, it feels twice and long and really would not suffer from being shorter by half. But if you’re a genre fan, you’ve gotta watch this thing at least once. It’s the cinematic equivalent of when your parents catch you smoking cigarettes, so they make you smoke a whole carton in one sitting. Rarely does making yourself sick feel this fun.
