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MICHAEL GOTHARD

Michael Alan Gothard

Locque / For Your Eyes Only (1981)

24th June 1939 – 2nd December 1992

#michael gothard #for your eyes only #james bond #007

Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?

It's not quite a horror film. Though it’s a variation on the story of Hansel and Gretel, it’s too intense to be a children’s picture. And as a psychological study, it’s just so much hokum. What Curtis Harrington’s WHOEVER SLEW AUNTIE ROO? (1971, Prime, Tubi, aka WHO SLEW AUNTIE ROO?) is, instead, is a lukewarm mess. It doesn’t even make it to hot — too camp to be taken seriously and too serious to be camp.

Shelley Winters is a one-time chorus girl living in a country manor in 1920s England. She’s obsessed with the memory of her late daughter and regularly consults phony medium Ralph Richardson trying to contact the girl. She also hosts a yearly sleepover for children from the local orphanage, which gets particularly sticky when she decides young Chloe Franks is the perfect substitute for her late daughter. Or does she think Franks is the girl’s reincarnation? That’s hinted at but never fully developed (like much else in the film). Anyway, she kidnaps the girl, which doesn’t sit well with Franks’ older brother (Mark Lester), who decides there are parallels between Winters and the witch in Hansel and Gretel. This could be the inspiration for stylish thrills. It isn’t.

It's a miracle that Harrington agreed to make the film after Winters’ erratic behavior filming his earlier WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH HELEN? (1971). But she requested him, which meant he had to give up the chance to shoot an adaptation of “Wuthering Heights,” a much better use for his baroque vision. He changed the setting to the 1920s, because he didn’t think the story made sense set in the 1970s and demanded the producers hire Gavin Labuert to re-write it. One shudders to think how bad it was before Lambert improved it, but all he ended up doing was washing garbage, thereby producing just so much clean garbage. The problem is a script that can’t decide what story it's telling. There was the potential for a unique take on the hagsploitation sub-genre with Winters seeming to be the monster only for the real horror to be Lester. There’s some sense of that early on. Winters may be eccentric, but her only crime is keeping Franks behind after the other children leave, which is painted sympathetically. She doesn’t plan to fatten and eat her as Lester suspects, but rather just to raise her in luxury. But the script also has her acting like a monster. At the start, she’s shown singing an old English folk song, “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme,” to her sleeping daughter, with a shock cut revealing the daughter to be a rotting corpse. When the children try to escape while she’s sleeping, she mysteriously appears at the front door to stop them and cackle about how they can’t get away from her. Wouldn’t the horror be more effective if it were all in Lester’s mind, driven by his anger that Winters wants to separate him from his sister? For those of us not warmed by his dewy-eyed presence in OLIVER! (1968), having him be an all-out monster would be rather satisfying. In a sense he is the real villain, but the script keeps trying to justify his behavior.

Harrington seems to have been phoning it in as director. The only scene that gets his juices flowing is the children’s discovery of the workshop left behind by Winters’ dead or runaway or goddess-knows-what husband, a famous stage magician. The Director delights in panning over the collection of strange objects, and when Lester disappears into a magic cabinet or tries to use what he thinks is a trick guillotine on his sister, the percussive editing raises the terror quotient. Then it’s all wiped away by a pointless jump scare when Winters’ sinister, grifting butler (Michael Gothard) turns up in a fright mask for no apparent reason.

After her out of control work in WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH HELEN? Winters turns in a surprisingly well-modulated performance here. She connects with the other characters, particularly the children, and seems to be having a ball incorporating elements of her character’s show business past. Her singing of “Tit Willow” with a little puppet bird and an audience of children who chime in on the title refrain is a delight. She also captures the woman’s pain when the children keep insisting on running away from her. Richardson is a hoot as the fake medium, and Gothard is appropriately menacing as the butler who’s surreptitiously robbing Winters. You also get Rosalie Crutchley as an orphanage head who could teach an advanced class stink eye, Pat Heywood as a sympathetic doctor, Lionel Jeffries as the local police inspector who flirts with her (something else that should have been developed further; their interactions are lightly comic in a film that needs something like that) and Hugh Griffith as the local butcher, billed at the start as “The Pigman.”