For all the memorable things we got from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, one of the silliest was the proliferation of “full-sentence-titles” thrillers, like Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte and How Awful About Alan. This was even the second of those movies directed by Curtis Harrington; he had previously helmed What’s the Matter with Helen? which, like this movie, features an absolutely demented Shelley Winters. In this one, Winters is the titular Auntie Roo who throws a big Christmas party at her mansion for a bunch of orphans every year. But Auntie Roo has a dark secret: the tragic death of her young daughter years before. And as luck would have it, this year’s crop of Christmas orphans has a young girl in it that looks uncannily like Auntie’s dead daughter. So, Auntie Roo gets up to some hijinks, let me tell you, and let me also tell you that at no point is the title of this movie even a question in the movie, so don’t expect Auntie Roo to be the victim in some sort of murder mystery; Shelley Winters doesn’t shuffle off this mortal coil very easily, curse the luck, so we’re stuck with her.
This movie is not good. Shelley Winters is doing her thing by which I mean alternating between being so over-the-top it’s cringe-inducing and being so over-the-top it’s hilarious. Unfortunately, she lands most often on the just cringe-inducing, though there are certainly moments of absolute hilarity. You have never seen a human being eat an apple the way Auntie Roo does. She ******* destroys that thing like she’s a vampire and it’s the neck of a nubile young woman. Though the biggest laugh she got from me was during a chase scene (yes, there are scenes of Shelley Winters chasing these young children around her mansion . . . so, so many scenes) when she just ******* face-plants coming around a corner and I don’t know, it was surely a stunt-woman or something, though this movie was made on the cheap, so who knows. Either way, I couldn’t stop laughing for a minute. Mark Lester is the enterprising young orphan who figures out that Auntie Roo is out of her mind and also dangerous and, perhaps in an effort to yin to her yang, he gives an absolutely lifeless performance, seeming so bored that he can’t really be bothered most of the time. As characters go, it’s hard to pick the one that’s the most annoying and unlikable. The one genuine pleasure of the movie is Sir Ralph Richardson as a disheveled, alcoholic medium that’s bleeding Auntie Roo dry with phony seances and messages from her dead daughter. He’s an absolute delight and every time he showed up I wanted to unironically cheer because it meant the movie was going to actually be fun for a few minutes. I’ll admit that I struggle to find Shelley Winters effective at the best of times and this is decidedly not the best of times. And I don’t think it even justifies itself as a “so-bad-it’s-good” movie; at only ninety minutes, it felt about twice that long and the laughter wasn’t consistent enough. It’s one to skip. 1 star.
tl;dr – Shelley Winters is a deranged woman and I’m not even talking about her character; this movie is quite bad and only occasionally “so-bad-it’s-good, so this one is best avoided. 1 star.