I consider this movie to be a comedy. I laugh from beginning to end. I really love it, but come on, "bone chilling and harrowing"??? The over the top acting of DeHavilland, the dumb blonde Elaine, the hilarious lines and line readings:it all makes for total camp, one step away from a John Waters film.
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I don't know, this might have been "campy" if it weren't so violent and disturbing. There was not one decent person in the whole film; everyone was completely corrupt and rotten. I don't think i have ever seen a film that had not even one "good guy" in the whole cast. At first you think the old lady is decent, until you find out about her possessive/controlling relationship with her screwed up son, and she refers to welfare cases as "offal." No, if this were camp material it would be very well-known, but it's kind of obscure. Do you also think of Lynch's "Blue Velvet" as campy?
"IMdB; where 14 year olds can act like jaded 40 year old critics...'
Of course Blue Velvet is campy! Despite the violence, there is a deliberate camp intention there. I mean come ON the obviously prop bird singing on the windowsill?? By the way the "old lady" was 48 at the time.
shareI guess Olivia de Havilland couldn't get any decent movie offers, so she accepted this crap. Awful!
shareActually, it's not considered to BE crap. It got decent reviews then and continues to get them now. For me, however, it's high camp. I've seen it a dozen times and love Ann Sothern's performance. But DeHavilland, who I consider to be a very good actress, really stinks in this, especially at the beginning. That phony sing song way of speaking is something the director really should have toned down. She was MUCH better later that same year in Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte.
shareI agree. A trashy low budget movie with an attempt to add some class to it. Sympathy for de Havilland comes from the scumbaggery of James Caan, not because of her trying to act like the nicest lady at first and the most abused victim later. Ridiculous concept, insane acting of de Havilland and the bum with the dracula eyeliner cement the impossibility of this to be perceived as anything but camp. I had fun watching Lady in a cage, it's fine as it is.
shareI think the Addams Family would find it ''campy''.
shareCampy or not, the whole film can be summed up by that one line of dialog that refers to "the welfare state." That line sounds like the ultimate right-wing put-down of liberalism, and the rest of the film mainly exists to rub that image into the faces of the audience. I rather like the film, in spite of its politics. The opening credit crawl boasts images of postwar urban decay.
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