What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969)

Directed by

Lee H. Katzin

Genre

thriller film, crime thriller film

Country

United States

Runtime

1h 41m

Rated

16

Rating

6.2 of 10 from 51 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

An aging Arizona widow hires elderly women as housekeepers. She tricks them out of their savings and then kills them.

suspensefuldarkpsychologically tensecreepymethodicalgrimunsettlingshadowy

What happens

What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? is a 1969 American horror thriller film directed by Lee H. Katzin and starring Geraldine Page, Ruth Gordon, Rosemary Forsyth, Robert Fuller and Mildred Dunnock. The screenplay by Theodore Apstein, based on the novel The Forbidden Garden by Ursula Curtiss, focuses on an aging Arizona widow who hires elderly female housekeepers and cons them out of their money before murdering them. The film's title is a reference to the 1962 horror film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, which was also produced by Robert Aldrich. Both films are considered part of the psycho-biddy subgenre, in which a formerly glamorous and now older woman has become psychotic. What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? was filmed mainly in Tucson in the fall of 1968. The original director, Bernard Girard, was fired from the project after completing approximately half of the film. Katzin was hired as his replacement, and received sole directorial credit. The music score was by Gerald Fried and the cinematography by Joseph F. Biroc. The film was funded by American Broadcasting Company (ABC), Palomar Pictures Corporation, and The Associates & Aldrich Company. Cinerama Releasing Corporation released What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? theatrically in the United States on July 23, 1969. The film grossed $3.2 million domestically, but netted a loss for the studio of $860,000. It received praise for its lead performances from Page and Gordon, as well as for its cinematography and its contemporary Gothic horror elements, though some critics felt the film's plot was predictable. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

More like this

• Daddy's Gone A-Hunting (1969)
• Any Second Now (1969)
• Flareup (1969)
• The Mad Room (1969)
• The Pigeon (1969)
• Dial M for Murder (1954)
• Hard Contract (1969)
• Run a Crooked Mile (1969)