Strait-Jacket

Written by Psycho's Robert Bloch, and a worthy addition to our recent series, "What Freud Forgot: The Mother-Daughter Plot." Joan Crawford is cast as a woman who literally gives her philandering husband the axe, with their three-year-old daughter looking on. Mom is sent to an insane asylum and Baby grows up to be Diane Baker. Mother and daughter are reunited twenty years later; for starters, the daughter wants her frumpy, asylum-dazed mom to dress more with-it, like she was when she was young. Needless to say, the axe murders resume. Said Time: "Creepy camera work and the conditioned reflex set off when (Joan's) baubles start to jangle in the dark add starch to Strait-Jacket. It must also be the first horror film able to boast that one of its diehard victims (Mitchell Cox) is a real-life vice president of the Pepsi-Cola Co. As for Pepsi-Cola Board Member Crawford, she plainly plays her mad scenes For Those Who Think Jung." Ouch.

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