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Show teAo' 1 m;A vi ,i x Stella Stevens tells Shelley Winters the awful truth about her past in The Mad Room. Movie review Mad Room: just stay home By Ed Ditterline Staff Writer The most exciting thing about 'The Mad Room," which is presently playing at the Centre Theatre and the Park Vu Drive-In is a wooley sheepdog-looking mut which carries around Shelley Winters' severed hand trying to find a place to bury it. If bloody grossities aren't exactly favorite in your movie-goining trecks, then stay home and watch an old Betty Davis-Joan Crawford thriller ... at least the acting is good. Shelley Winters, who has made a fortune playing the part of a fat, slovenly middle-aged woman (who has a propensity for screaming diatribes), literally and figuratively gets butchered in this flick. Miss Winters, who gave a fairly acceptable performance "ala Winters" was at a bad disadvantage being coupled with Stella Stevens, who gave a bloody performance. Miss Stevens was so overcome by her role as the sickeningly sweet big sis and later the audience finds out the real butcherer, that the whole movie gets buried in its own celluloid. The plot, such as it is, concerns the brother and sister of Miss Stevens, who have been in a mental institution for 12 years because they butchered their mother and father when they were four and six years old. The reason was that their parents burned their toys for firewood. (Yes it kk.j to take 1 tk v. 11 15 tad io take . . . ) The doctor at the institution decides that becal Miss Steven's younger brofe " now 18, they cannot keep hi! the hospital any longer and h releases the brother and sister (who cannot be separated from her brother) into the custody of big sister. The kids move in with Shelley Winters, who is the step-mother of the man Miss Stevens is going to marry and immediately decide that they have to have their "mad room" where they can go to "fight-out" the problems that bother them. The rest of the movie is wasted in trying to find a mad room, killing Shelley Winters, finding a place to dump her and that dumb dog tromping around with that bloody hand in his mouth. The movie is a reincarnation of "Ladies in Retirement," which failed to set Broadway on fire in 1940, when Flora Robson played the leading role. Columbia, however, decided to make a movie, |
