Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

preppy-3 This takes place in 1920s England. Mrs. Forrest (Shelley Winters) lives in this big old mansion by herself. She had a daughter who disappeared years ago...and she never forgot her. Every Christmas she opens her house to kids at a nearby orphanage. One Christmas she meets young Katie (Chloe Franks) who looks just like her daughter. She plans to keep Katie forever but Katie's protective older brother Christopher (Mark Lester) won't let that happen.VERY mild horror film...it barely qualifies as horror! It's more funny than scary to see Winters chewing the scenery non-stop. The story is no more than an updating of "Hansel and Gretel" and is VERY thin. There's tons of filler and it gets boring when Winters isn't on screen. Also Lester and Franks are pretty bad in their roles. Still it LOOKS great (the DVD transfer is great) and it is well-directed by Curtis Harrington, but it's just not scary enough.

tomgillespie2002 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.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

MARIO GAUCI I watched this one - and the film on the flip side of the MGM DVD, WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH HELEN (1971) - in tribute to the recent passing of Curtis Harrington; I also just ordered his NIGHT TIDE (1961) and RUBY (1977), both of which contain Audio Commentaries featuring the director. Personally I'm most grateful to the man because, thanks to his efforts, James Whale's long-lost horror classic THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932) was rediscovered - a film which, when I finally caught up with it, jumped straight to my all-time favorite slot! Anyway, AUNTIE ROO is an AIP horror piece which came at the tail-end of the so-called "Whatever" cycle - which began with WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962) and was noted for giving larger-than-life macabre roles to ageing female Hollywood stars. This one featured Shelley Winters (who also co-starred with Debbie Reynolds in HELEN), who certainly gave the part her all. She was surrounded by accomplished cast members (Ralph Richardson, Lionel Jeffries, Hugh Griffith, Rosalie Crutchley, Michael Gothard and child actors Mark Lester and Chloe Franks) and the behind-the-camera crew was equally imposing (Jimmy Sangster and Gavin Lambert among the screenwriters and cinematographer Desmond Dickinson).Incidentally, just as Hammer's STRAIGHT ON TILL MORNING (1972) took its inspiration from "Peter Pan", this was based on the popular fairy-tale by the Brothers Grimm "Hansel & Gretel" - with Lester and Franks as the siblings at the mercy of 'witch' Winters! Ironically, however, the first half of the film works rather better than the heavy-handed fairy-tale scenario: the story has been updated and reset to pre-WWI England (where it was also shot) and necessitates quite a bit of exposition (including a subplot involving Richardson and Gothard fleecing the rich widow by holding fake séances, in which she tries to contact her own daughter about whose death she is guilt-ridden and whose decaying corpse she still conserves!). It may be that, not having another actress of her own caliber to play against, Winters too often resorts to hamminess and gradually unbalances the film...though it must be said that Lester is supposed to have a demonic side to him, given his callous disposal of Winters, but which he's largely unable to convey (for this reason, it'll be interesting to check out his NIGHT HAIR CHILD [1972] where he plays a disturbed boy menacing stepmom Britt Ekland and which I've had on DivX for quite some time)! This, then, would seem to suggest that the supporting cast is wasted; with respect to Jeffries and Griffith, that may perhaps be true, but Richardsoin does get to demonstrate his incomparable thespian skills in a couple of extended scenes (still, his role isn't quite as large or central to the plot as one would expect from his above-the-title billing!).Harrington's wonderful period atmosphere is admirably sustained, however, and the scenes in which Winters lullabies her long-dead daughter have a definite creepiness to them (ditto the sequence in which the children insinuate themselves into the room belonging to Winters' late conjurer husband, play around with a still-active guillotine and are scared by a costumed Gothard).

Woodyanders Mischievous Christopher (the terrific Mark Lester of "Oliver!" and "Eyewitness" fame) and his sweet little sister Katy (adorable blonde sprite Chloe Franks, who played the daughters of Christopher Lee in "The House That Dripped Blood" and Joan Collins in "Tales from the Crypt") are a couple of orphans living in Great Britian in the 1920's. Christopher convinces Katy that loopy recluse Rosie "Auntie Roo" Forrest (Shelley Winters chewing the scenery with her trademark four-sheets-to-the-wind hambone panache), a former music hall singer who once a year invites a bunch of kids to her huge, crumbling mansion for Christmas diner, is really a witch who plans to fatten Katy up and eat her. Director Curtis Harrington, adapting a fiendishly clever script co-written by veteran Hammer horror film scribe Jimmy ("The Curse of Frankenstein," "The Horror of Dracula") Sangster, whips up a delightfully twisted and darkly amusing Gothic black comedy version of "Hansel and Gretel." The first-rate cast have a ball with their juicy parts: Ralph Richardson as an eccentric charlatan medium, Michael Gothard (the crazed killer in "Scream and Scream Again") as a mean butler, Lionel Jeffries as a friendly, hearty police inspector, Hugh Griffiths as a jolly butcher, and Marianne Stone as a strict orphanage supervisor. Desmond Dickinson's polished cinematography, Kenneth J. Jones' spooky orchestral score, and the marvelously macabre conclusion are all solid and satisfying as well. Good, ghoulish fun.