Does anyone have any ideas for potential Grande Dame Guignol films you'd like to share? Much earlier in this discussion Snarky shared some of his ideas -- such as a story called HORNET'S NEST, where Crawford played a pair of good vs. evil identical twins.
What ideas do you wish could've been done back in the '60s or '70s when this sub-genre was at its peak?
In lurid Halloween-ish 1966/67 color, probably in London and possibly from Hammer Films...
I just see it -- the evil Crawford with a vicious beehive hairdo and the benign clairvoyant Crawford with long cascading hair who eventually overcomes her wicked sister, the holy Crawford watching in mock-horror as a fire consumes the nasty sister's Victorian mansion as evil Joan is attacked -- strangled and stabbed -- by a vengeful giant hydra plant she been growing and abusing for years.
I like to think it exists out there somewhere.
The grande-dame-guignol (psycho-biddy/hagsploitation) genre could have easily been one of my favorites, except that most of them just simply weren't very good -- what used to be called unaffectionately "drive-in" movies... Yes, the potential was great, like the four Bette did in the mid-'60s, but most of the others were far too crap to have any fondness for them collectively.-
I mean, who doesn't love a middle-aged maniacal mama with a blunt instrument or an ice pick or something, living in her gothic domicile and may or may not have eradicated somebody in the past or the present?? I mean, it's
absolutely primal for many -- if not most -- of us.
But this sub-genre was seized upon, rather predictably, by third-rate filmmakers in the wake of BABY JANE's success, so a poorly-edited
Slutty-Grandma-with-a-Blowtorch** was about as good as we were ever going to get... Which, perhaps anticipating this, is why Bette said circa 1965 that the horror genre had been good to her in the previous couple of years "but I want out," and she indeed should never have returned to them as she later did.
I also think the era has a lot to do with it... You need a valid diva (ideally one with a Scorpio Rising), past her cinematic prime, to head these pictures, and they were still around in the '60s and now are long gone... Who would do them now -- Jane Fonda? Helen Mirren? Those actresses would probably be okay, but it just wouldn't be the same.
Also, the angsty tension endemic to the '60s, where the century appears to divide and you have the sacred pre-apocalyptic doom of the first half of the '60s and post-apocalyptic hellscape of the last half of the decade in stark contrast to one another as everyone appears to be looking into the Face of Eternity...... well, isn't that combination a little difficult to reproduce in the present?
Even when they still had those things in the '60s, most of the entries kinda sucked.
Besides, HUSH ... HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE perfected the genre and, in my mind, can't really be surpassed. As Judith Crist, one of the '60s more objective critics observed, with CHARLOTTE "the guignol is about as grand as it gets."
** Slutty-Grandma-with-a-Blowtorch, both title and concept -- and all related intellectual property -- is copyrighted by tellytalk.net and Snarky Oracle -- so you just turn and walk away, Lee Daniels!
That settled, Diana Ross is a possibility.
