William Castle

 

STRAIT-JACKET-1964-Lucy Harbin (Joan Crawford) comes home early from a trip to find her younger husband (un-billed Lee Majors in his screen debut) has been doing the nasty with an old flame. Outraged she chops them up with an ax. Unfortunately her young daughter Carol sees the whole thing. Lucy is confined to an insane asylum. 20 years later Carol (Diane Baker) tells her boyfriend Michael Fields (John Anthony Hayes) all about it because mom has just been released and is coming for a visit! 

Carol has been living in anonymity with aunt Emily (Rochelle Hudson) and uncle Bill (Leif Erickson). "My mother....a murderess". Lucy arrives and they get along at first but she's reluctant to meet Michael and seems to like knives. While shopping with Carol she freaks out when some kids sing "London Bridge". She wakes up with decapitated corpses in her bed and a bloody ax. But of course when everyone comes to look there's nothing there. She really gets upset when she sees the weird handyman Krause (George Kennedy) kill a chicken. When her doctor (non-actor Mitchell Cox) pays her a visit he winds up axed in the slaughterhouse. When Krause finds the dead doc's body he gets axed too. When Michael's parents refuse the marriage Mike's father (Howard St. John) is the next victim. A whacked out ending reveals whether Lucy is crazy or not. 

William Castle made this fairly suspenseful if predicable little tale that was originally suppose to star Joan Blondel in the lead but an accident forced her out and “Mommie Dearest” herself Joan Crawford signed on but not before Robert Bloch had to completely rewritten the script to suit Crawford including the final scene. At the time Joan was on the board of directors of the Pepsi company (her late husband had been the CEO) and made sure there was some product placement as well as getting Mitchell Cox, the Pepsi vice president to portray her doctor! 

Castle also made THE NIGHT CALLER with Barbara Stanwyck the same year. He and Crawford teamed up again the next year for I SAW WHAT YOU DID.

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Oblivious

SANDS OF OBLIVION (2007) is a pretty crappy TV movie that debuted on SYFY channel. It's actually based on a real event when Cecil B. DeMille finished making THE TEN COMMANDMENTS in 1923. The obsessed director had created a huge "city of the Pharaohs" in The Guadalupe desert around 170 miles north of L.A.  When filming was over he had the whole thing bulldozed and buried beneath the sand. Eventually artifacts began to appear and the place became known as "the lost city of DeMille". This boring production proposes that DeMille (played here briefly by THE SIMPSONS' Don Castellaneta) was a Mason and he buried some lost relic, (an "inverted pyramid") in the sands and some kind of jackal monster kills people. A giant cobra made of sand, an attack of locusts and a dune buggy car chase are the highlights and Academy Award winner George Kennedy has a small role as the guy kind of responsible for the mayhem. The initial plot is good but as usual it's undermined by bad acting, long stretches of talk and mediocre SFX. Director David Flores also made BOA VS. PYTHON and LAKE PLACID 2.

Two of the stars Adam Baldwin (as an archaeologist who overacts ("The Master has come for us!")) and  Morena Baccarin (as his ex-wife, also an archaeologist) had starred in the 2002 series FIREFLY. A TV actor Victor Webster is the hero who says things like "weapon up" and "walking meat puppet" and has to fight cardboard cutout ancient Egyptians!

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