Final Girl Film Club: Strait-Jacket (1964)

(Note: This movie is being reviewed as part of the Final Girl Film Club. I swear to you, there will be no awful puns about the name of my blog and the means by which people are killed. That'd be low humor, and baby, I'm high class. But, come to think of it, the film does serve as a good warning: Be careful with your ax around psycho killers...they tend to psycho kill with them, Eugene.)


Boasting probably the best tagline ever ("WARNING! Strait-Jacket vividly depicts ax murder!), William Castle's Strait-Jacket plays exactly like you'd expect a movie boasting its "surprise shock ending" would. The movie shows its hand maybe three minutes in and spends the rest of the time trying to convince you that the murderess is Joan Crawford.

Well, she is a murderess, but that's the exposition. Joan plays Lucy Harbin, "very much a woman, and very much aware of the fact." One evening, she comes home to find her husband (Lee Majors!) in bed with another woman (no clue!) She decides to take out her frustrations with her husband in a clean, healthy way: Ax murder.

There's about a two second clip of Lucy being taken away in a strait-jacket, which is where the title comes from, I guess. The whole time, we're focusing on the face of Lucy's daughter, who saw Lee Majors making love and the double ax murder! Clearly closing the bedroom door matters not to this family, and that's going to lead to some problems.

20 years later, Lucy is let out from the asylum and, for some reason, is allowed to live with her daughter, who is planning to be engaged. Carol (Diane Baker) has grown into a beautiful, artistic girl - Lucy couldn't be happier. Carol seems oddly detached. It's been 20 years or so though, so I guess that's explainable. The two go shopping, where Carol buys her mom clothes and a wig to make her look exactly the way she looked 20 years ago (!).

A change comes over Lucy - she's more alive than she was with the gray hair and frumpy sweaters. Perhaps she's every bit a woman and every bit aware of it again. Everybody is having a great time, but Lucy wakes one morning to some creepy children chanting "Lucy Harbin had an ax..." and two heads in her bed! She freaks out, but by the time she gets her family to check it out, everything is gone.

Lucy settles down and vamps up, thinking herself just as hot as she was 20 years ago. To illustrate this, she starts hitting on Carol's fiance in the weirdest, most uncomfortable way an ax murderess could hit on you: rubbing her hands all over the poor guy's head.

THEN THE KILLING BEGINS!

And man, does it begin. This movie is the Dark Knight of ax decapitations. Thwock! There goes Lucy's doctor's head! Thwock! There goes the hired hand's head! Thwock! There goes another head! Thwock! There goes Columbia Torch Girl's head! Best of all? You see the freakin' heads fly off.


In a post-Psycho world, I guess that isn't very shocking. The shower scene, after all, did include a few frames of knife penetration, and Castle's own shameless rip featured an old woman's head rolling off when she hit the bottom of her wheelchair lift (probably the best kill scene ever). Showing the heads roll off via a clever use of shadows would be a cop out for Castle, the king of gimmick horror.

There are no gimmicks to this movie, aside from the trailer that boasts of the surprise shock ending and the little paper axes handed out to the paying crowd. Castle presents a straight forward proto-slasher, and it's not that bad. Matter of fact, and I'm kind of embarassed to admit it, but it made me jump once, once the murdering started.

I suspose that Castle's main problem is that he's quite unable to build suspense. In Homicidal, he forsakes plot to accomidate for a crazy plot twist, and here, he gives everything away in the first five minutes. If it wasn't for that, the twist at the end would have played better. All the build-up would have paid off - watching Carol lead her mom through the farm, giving her a photo album with pictures of her dad, and her reactions to various ax-inclusive things were good, but there was simply no payoff.

Strait-Jacket's strength is its soundtrack. It is very Leave It To Beaverish, until there's some suspenseful part or an ax murder, where some weird quasi sci-fi thing takes over. Very creepy. Crawford delivers a great preformance amidst amatuers and Pepsi C.E.O.s, but the movie isn't anywhere near as good as it could have been. Even though it was written by the author of Psycho, Strait-Jacket, like many of Castle's movies, finds itself firmly in Alfred Hitchcock's shadow.



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