Review by LL Soares
(Warning: Contains Spoilers)
When you’ve seen as many movies as I have over the years (including more than my share of “so bad they’re good” flicks), it’s hard to be surprised anymore. But I had more than a few WTF! moments while watching the 1971 movie SOMETIMES AUNT MARTHA DOES DREADFUL THINGS. How did I miss this one? What surprised me most were 1) how awful it is, and 2) how hilarious it is.
We begin with Aunt Martha (Abe Zwick) coming out a travel agency. Right away, you’ll notice something. This isn’t a woman. It’s a guy in a bad wig. Nobody in their right mind would be tricked by this “disguise.” She is looking at some cruise tickets in her hand, then she gets a taxi home.
When she gets there, her odd and very nosy neighbor, Mrs. Adams (Yanka Mann) is outside (across the street) with her daughter Vicki (Robin Hughes). Mrs. Adams waves and calls out “Hello,” several times, but Aunt Martha just ignores her. So the woman crosses the street and even climbs the front steps while Martha searches in her purse for her house keys, saying “Hello” over and over. Martha has no choice but to invite her inside.
Martha lives in the house with her “nephew” Stanley (Wayne Crawford, who also used the name Scott Lawrence), a goofy guy who is always playing pranks. Stanley always wears a vest (no shirt) and snakeskin pants. He never wears anything else. He never changes his clothes. And he’s always getting high. Martha complains about Stanley, but mentions that the next day is his birthday. Mrs. Adams insists on making a cake and coming over the next day with Vicki as a surprise. Willing to do anything to get Mrs. Adams to leave, Martha agrees.
Martha takes off her wig, revealing herself to be Paul, a guy who is wanted by the police. He always puts on a wig and women’s clothes when he leaves the house, but now that he’s home, he kicks off his heels and opens a beer. Despite the fact that he’s not Stanley’s real aunt, he acts like the real thing, constantly nagging and chastising Stanley for his silly behavior and his running off with girls all the time.
Unlike a movie like PSYCHO (1960), AUNT MARTHA makes no attempt at building suspense. It’s no secret that Martha is really Paul. And it’s obvious from the start that a murder that Stanley did in Baltimore, that he can’t remember, was really committed by Paul. But Paul loves Stanley, is obsessed with him, and keeps the lie going so that Stanley is dependent on him. They have moved to the suburbs of Miami, and come up with the ruse that they’re aunt and nephew to stay under the radar of any police who might be looking for them.
Meanwhile, Stanley goes around, getting high with friends and going to the beach with girls. When one girl, Alma (Marty Cordova) demands he bring her back home with him, they end up in a bedroom, and two weird things happen. First, Alma takes off her clothes and starts making out with Stanley, but when she tries to take off his pants, Stanley goes crazy, shouting and demanding that she leave. The other weird thing is that Aunt Martha comes rushing in with a knife. Stanley wrestles with his aunt and Alma gets away (after taking an awful long time to put her clothes on downstairs), but Martha soon after tracks her down in the woods and stabs Alma to death.
This is a pattern we’ll see more of, where Stanley seems attracted to girls but can’t have sex with them. And Martha kills any girls who she sees with Stanley.
At one point, an old bum named Hubert (Don Craig) shows up at the local Pizza Place (that’s the actual name of the place) where Stanley supposedly “works” (though we never see him actually work there) asking for Stanley. Stanley remembers him from the Baltimore days and brings him back to the house. Martha/Paul is convinced that he’s a con-man and is up to something, but Stanley is trusting and innocent (i.e., stupid). Martha agrees to let Hubert stay in the guest room, but later creeps down the stairs and tries to kill their new houseguest with a gun. Hubert is expecting her, though, and has a gun of his own. Hubert reveals that he knows all about what’s going on, but only wants a place to stay, since his landlord back in Baltimore threw him out, and he has nowhere to go. Martha reluctantly agrees to let him stay.
In another scene, Stanley goes to a shack in the woods near his home, and finds a guy named Joe (Mike MIngoia) getting high with two girls, Dolores (Maggie Wood) and Mary Lou (Sandra Lurie), and they ask him to join them. When Dolores (who is a waitress at Pizza Place) tries to make out with Stanley and remove his pants, his goes nutso again, even going to far to try to strangle Dolores and then Mary Lou. Joe wrestles with him and knocks him down, and they flee.
(SPOILER ALERT!)
Stanley spends a day hanging out with Vicki, the young nurse who lives across the street from them with her mother, Mrs. Adams. When they come back, Martha sees them and gets jealous, which, as we know, makes Aunt Martha do those dreadful things. Around the same time, Hubert starts ransacking the house, looking for lot, and finds a little treasure box full of jewelry that Martha has stashed (that obviously once belonged to the woman she killed in Baltimore). When he tries to flee, Martha chases him with a gun. Meanwhile, Mrs. Adams comes over with a birthday cake, and Hubert knocks her over. She starts screaming and Stanley brings her to that shack behind his house to calm her down (why not just bring her home? She lives across the street!). Mrs. Adams start screaming about her baby (shortly before, Vicki told Aunt Martha that her mother is pregnant, even though she looks pretty old), and she also has a bad heart.
She dies, but Stanley is terrified that her baby will die with her, so he grabs a kitchen knife (the same one that was used in the murder back in Baltimore!) and removes the baby himself!! From this point on, the movie is actually a little creepy. When Martha finally finds him (after finishing Hubert off), she finds Stanley rocking a bloody baby in his arms! It looks like a doll, and I guess that’s because it’s dead. Stanley leaves the baby on Vicki’s doorstep and rings the bell, (she screams when she finds it).
(END OF SPOILERS)
Paul and Stanley then go on the lam, convinced the police will be coming after them. Their strange relationship reaches its violent climax inside an abandoned movie studio, where they go to hide out, and where the police hunt them down.
Note: one of the cops is none other than William Kerwin (aka Thomas Wood)—from lots of Herschell Gordon Lewis movies, including his classic, BLOOD FEAST (1963) —in what amounts to a cameo. In the credits it says that Kerwin was also a grip in the movie’s crew (!).
This movie is amazing! The acting is pretty awful throughout but very entertaining, with Abe Zwick and Wayne Crawford, our two leads, playing it especially over-the-top. The script is nonsensical and unintentionally hilarious. Zwick’s Paul has to be the most unconvincing “guy pretending to be a woman” of all time. Mrs. Adams looks way too old to be a mother (and doesn’t look pregnant at all, even though her baby is fully formed). And Vicki and Mrs. Adams are always getting rides or taking long walks to get back to their house, when they live RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET.
AUNT MARTHA is Thomas Casey’s only director credit. I wish he had made other movies. He was also a writer (FLESH FEAST, 1970) and a cinematographer, but his resume is very short. A lot of the cast, including star Abe Zwick, have this movie as their only acting credit (or just have a few). Wayne Crawford (who plays Stanley) had the most successful acting career, going on to act in movies like GOD’S BLOODY ACRE (1975) and VALLEY GIRL (1983) and TV shows like HILL STREET BLUES and CAGNEY & LACEY. Crawford even played the lead in a movie called JAKE SPEED (1986).
This is a one-of-a-kind, weirdo movie, that definitely should be sought out. At times, it reminded me of the early comedies of John Waters, even though it was clearly meant to be serious. Even though it’s billed as a horror movie I think that, with a laugh track, it could easily pass for a sitcom that just happens to have some nudity and murder in it. I loved it.
SOMETIMES AUNT MARTHA DOES DREADFUL THINGS needs to be seen to be believed. So go see it!
© Copyright 2019 by LL Soares
L.L. Soares 