Review #383: 'Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?' (1972)

Shelley Winters stars in this combination of modern, macabre film making, along with fairytale interpretation, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? focuses on the seemingly giving widow, Mrs Forrest (Winters), who offers food, shelter and presents to local orphans at Christmas time. The film wastes no time in showing the darkness, and weird psychosis of this lonely woman. In the opening scene she takes the decaying body of a child (later shown to be her dead daughter), out of a cot in a secret room in the house. This instantly gives the film it's post-Psycho familial tragedy. This is often more disturbing as we never really know exactly what happened to the child. It is seen briefly in a scene involving a fall from a bannister, but there always seems to be the spectre of something more sinister.

After siblings, Christopher and Katy Coombs (Mark Lester - you know, that posh titular "orphan" of the Oliver! (1969) musical - and Chloe Franks), secretly enter the mansion, and a relationship between the girl and Mrs Forrest ensues that develops into a strange obsession, that leads to Winters connecting Katy with her dead daughter. This is where the film falls into fairytale territory, using the Hansel and Gretel narrative, the children are trapped in the house and either she is, or the children believe that she will cook them.

It's certainly not the best of it's kind, but then again, it's not the worst. Winters does however, have some of the best/worst "crazy-eyes" in cinema history. In one scene she violently takes a bite of an apple, her eyes rolling around, wild, frantically. The film does also boast some good, but small performances from the great Ralph Richardson and Lionel Jeffries, but as with Oliver!, I still have great inability to believe that Mark Lester would ever have been orphaned or poor - he is just too well-spoken.


Directed by: Curtis Harrington
Starring: Shelley Winters, Mark Lester, Chloe Franks
Country: UK

Rating: ***

Marc Ivamy