Luddy (Patricia Carmichael) gets out of a mental hospital after serving thirty years for killing her mother. With nowhere to turn, Luddy is taken in by a wealthy family who feel sorry for her and offer her a job as a housekeeper. The cranky matriarch Delilah (Agnes Moorehead) is a wheelchair bound shrew who constantly harps on everyone around her. When she abruptly announces the family is effectively cut out of her will, they begin hatching a murder plot with Luddy making for a perfect scapegoat.
Dear Dead Delilah is an insufferable blend of southern fried gothic melodrama and an old-fashioned whodunit. The fact that there’s an old woman’s name in the title may lead you to believe this is going to be one of those What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? types of horror flicks. Really though, it plays kind of like a cross between Dementia 13 and Ten Little Indians.
You can tell it was directed by a novelist (in this case, John Farris, who also wrote The Fury), as there are too many characters, huge chunks of exposition, and a lot of big speeches. The characters are kind of the problem because none of them are remotely likeable as they are all greedy, alcoholics, druggies, or just plain despicable. You know you’re in trouble when your axe murderer is the most sympathetic character.
Since Farris isn’t really a director, he has no discernable style and no sense of pacing. The movie just sort of ambles along from one scene to the next and it takes it an awfully long time to develop any sort of rhythm. By the time the axe murders occur, it’s hard to care one way or another. Farris does deliver one terrific decapitation however, but that isn’t nearly enough to justify Dear Dead Delilah’s dreary existence.
No comments:
Post a Comment