Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

Spoonatects Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

SeeQuant Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

Humaira Grant It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

tomgillespie2002 After Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) made cinematic waves and raked in the profits as a result, studios were eager to deliver their own take on mad-man horror cinema. Hammer's unique brand of British Gothic and literary monsters was begin to wobble as audience's tastes moved on as a result of the leaps and bounds being made in the genre in Europe and the U.S.. Robert Aldrich's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) made a success out of bringing a once- Hollywood great, Bette Davis, out of a forced early retirement and turning her into a screen psychopath. Hammer pinched Davis for themselves in The Nanny (1965), and repeated the trick again the same year with Tallulah Bankhead in Die! Die! My Darling!, or to give it its blander, more widely-used alternative title, Fanatic.American Patricia Carroll (Stefanie Powers) arrives in London to marry her handsome beau Alan (Maurice Kaufmann). After admitting that she has been exchanging letters with the mother of her former, now-dead fiancé, she heads off on her own to pay a visit to her would-be mother-in- law when Alan disapproves. Patricia believes that she is doing a nice thing. and the old lady Mrs. Trefoile (Bankhead) seems harmless enough at first, if a little nutty. She is being guilt-tripped into staying the night, and ends up staying much longer than she had planned, as the true extent of Mrs. Trefoile's religious zealotry reveals itself. There are no mirrors in the house as vanity is a sin, lip-stick and red clothing are banned, and the food consists of unrecognisable slop. Just as Patricia is about to leave, she lets slip of her intention to re-marry, causing Mrs. Trefoile to lock the poor young lady away until she learns the evil of her ways.It may not be the most memorable entry into the fleeting 'psycho- biddy' fad, but Die! Die! My Darling! has its fair share of moments courtesy of a tight and witty script by Richard Matheson, and a fiery performance by Bankhead, in what turned out to be her final appearance (she died the following year). Powers cuts a likable but frustrating lead, as she fails time and time again to make any real attempts to escape outside of making the occasional feeble struggle. Any in the audience used to the hardened, capable heroines we tend to get nowadays will no doubt be shouting at the screen. There's a terrific supporting cast, which includes husband-and-wife servants Harry (Peter Vaughan) and Anna (Yootha Joyce), and a young Donald Sutherland as the simple-minded Joseph. You may not have the desire to see it more than once in your lifetime, but it makes for a cosy Saturday afternoon B-movie.

Scott Amundsen As thrillers go, DIE! DIE! MY DARLING! really isn't all that bad; it has all the necessary elements of the genre and the acting is several steps above the average for this kind of film.The plot is a tad bit predictable, but not uninteresting: Patricia Carroll (Stefanie Powers) comes to London to marry her fiancé Alan Glentower (Maurice Kaufmann). One day she decides to pay a visit in the country to Mrs Trefoile (Tallulah Bankhead in her final film), the mother of her former fiancé Stephen, who died in a car accident. Why? We're not sure; to pay respects, maybe.BIG MISTAKE. Because the old woman is certifiable, blames Pat for her son's death, and before either we or Pat know what we are about, the old bat has the poor woman locked in a room, refusing to give her food, and reading daily to her from the Bible to "purify" her for her "reunion" with Stephen (whose death we find out at some point was in fact a suicide). And the batty old thing has managed to infect her house servants Anna (Yootha Joyce) and Harry (Peter Vaughan) with her peculiar brand of insanity, or maybe there's money in it for them, but they do her bidding without question. Also on the premises is Joseph (Donald Sutherland, unrecognizable in a sensational performance), a developmentally disabled young man who does odd jobs around the house and who might help Pat but in his innocence he runs everything by the old lady.The hour or so that Powers spends fighting to escape has its moments: when Pat tries to outwit Mrs Trefoile (she comes close a couple of times) the excitement picks up; Powers, as always, is fiercely intelligent even when playing the victim. Which makes her lack of success slightly hard to swallow, especially since it's a while before the old bat finally pulls out a gun. In fact, the moment when Pat informs the old woman that her son killed himself, the loony old thing shouts "LIE!" and belts her across the mouth. And Pat just sort of shrinks away. This to me was the one flaw in the plot: Powers's character is intelligent, strong, and not a shrinking violet; WHY she doesn't just punch the old bat's lights out is somewhat of a mystery, but if she had, most of the movie would not exist.The acting, as is often true of Hammer films, is excellent. Tallulah Bankhead brings her own exceptional style to the Grand Guignol proceedings; as a final film, it is nothing to be ashamed of. She runs the gamut from terrifying to hilarious with her usual panache.Yootha Joyce and Peter Vaughan as the mysterious couple who keep house for Mrs Trefoile deliver splendid performances; just enough weirdness mixed with a drop of humanity to keep the viewer guessing. And Donald Sutherland, as I have mentioned before, is so good I didn't even recognize him and I've been a fan for over forty years.The viewer has only one hurdle to jump: to buy the premise that a strong, healthy young woman could so easily be overpowered by a frail old woman. Bankhead is a formidable presence but Powers is forced to play the shrinking violet in some scenes to make her credible as a victim. Some of that doesn't work all that well, but otherwise the movie is jolly good fun.Pass the popcorn.

sol **SPOILERS*** While on a trip to London with her fiancée Alan Glentower, Maurice Kafmann, pretty Pat Carroll, Stefanie Powers, pays a courtesy call to the mother of her previous suitor, Steven, Mrs. Trefoile, Talluah Bankhead, at her estate outside the city. To Pat's shock and surprise the frail and harmless looking Mrs. Trefoile soon, after agreeing to spend the night at the house, turns out to be her worst nightmare.It not only turns out that Mrs. Trefoile is a dangerous religious fanatic but she also holds Pat responsible for the death of her son Steven who was killed in a car accident! Keeping Pat locked up against her will Mrs. Terfolie tries to brainwash her with her off the wall biblical religious philosophy by forcing Pat to stay a virgin her entire life! That's until, when she's dead, Pat's reunited with Mrs. Trfoile's squeaky clean son and future husband Steven in heaven! As things turn out Pat has no interest in being united with the deceased Steven since she's already engaged to the real live Alan Glentower. It later comes out to Mrs. Trefoile's disgust that Pat has already had sexual relations, thus not being a virgin, but even far far more disturbing is that her sinless, in doing what the Good Book teaches, son Steven didn't die in a car accident at all! In fact Steven killed himself because he just couldn't stand his overbearing and nagging mother Mrs. Trefoile trying to run his life; Run it and him straight into the ground where Steven eventually ended up!As the movie goes on we soon learn that Mrs. Trefoile doesn't exactly practice what she preaches in the many evil things, like cold-blooded murder, that she does in trying to keep the terrified Pat in line. Mrs. Trefoile also has the help of her servants Harry, Peter Vauhan, and Anna, Vootha Joyce, to make sure that her insane plan to have Pat marry her dead son Steven becomes a reality! There's also the dim witted handyman Joseph, Donald Sutherland, whom Mrs. Trefoile keeps around the house to screw in light-bulbs and take out the garbage. And even those simple tasks, in him being so disjointed and empty headed, Joseph has difficulty doing. In fact Joseph besides being a bit, to say the least, slow also has this corpse like complexion-sheet white-that has him come across looking like an extra from horror flick "Night of the living Dead"!***SPOILERS*** Mrs. Trefoile's grand plan soon falls apart with Pat's fiancée Alan showing up at her house and both her servants Anna and Joseph, by then Harry was out of the picture, turning against her. In her attempt to save her son Steven's, whom she erected a shrine for in her basement, soul that in her sick and demented mind, by her forcing Steven to kill himself, she condemned Mrs. Trefoile finally went off the deep end and into the purgatory that she and she alone created for herself!P.S "Frantic" or its other title "Die Die my Darling" turned out to be the last motion picture that Tallulah Bankhead was to star in. Mrs. Bankhead died three years later at the age of 66 on December 12,1968 of pneumonia! An illness that her strong addiction to tobacco, in smoking up to 7 packs of cigarettes a day, was a major factor in her contracting!

bowmanrand I wasn't expecting too much, but I actually enjoyed this movie and found parts of it quite suspenseful. OK, there are some cheesy elements for sure, but overall it is worth seeing. Tallulah is great, and I also really liked Yootha Joyce's dark performance as Anna.I wanted to see this because I recently saw the play "Looped" starring Valerie Harper as Tallulah. A fun show - I saw it at Arena Stage in DC but it's supposed to be headed for Broadway. Anyhoo, the premise of the play is based on a true story of Tallulah taking many long hours to re-record or "loop" one line of dialogue from this movie. The line is about a third of the way in, when they are leaving the house to go into town. Tallulah says boozily: "And Patricia, as I was telling you, even though that deluded rector has in literal effect closed the church to me, I have as you note designed to maintain proper service of the Lord in my own home." Or something close to that. In the play they took some artistic license, and shortened and changed the line to: "And so, Patricia, as I was telling you, that deluded rector has, in literal effect, closed the doors of the church to me." Which was good since in the play she says it about 50 times!