Episode 11 of Season 2! Host, Gratton Conwill and special guest, Matt Fields discuss What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969).
Day 11
What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice 1h 41m
What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice is a Hollywood Horror-thriller film directed by Lee H. Katzin and written by Theodore Apstein. It premiered on July 23rd 1969. It was adapted from Ursula Curtiss’ 1962 novel: The Forbidden Garden. The name of the movie brings to mind Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, and this was no mistake. Aldrich was a producer for What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice and the name was meant to attract some of the success that Baby Jane experienced 7 years earlier. In the years following the release of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, the hagsploitation genre exploded. Hagsploitation usually involved the practice of casting older actresses who were popular decades earlier as deranged or murderous older women in horror-thriller films. Aldrich produced a loose series of unconnected hagsploitation films starting with Baby Jane in 1962 and ending with What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice in 1969.
After The Forbidden Garden Novel gained popularity, Robert Aldrich bought the rights to make a film adaptation, seeing the potential to make something similar to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane and Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Filming began with Bernard Girard as director. After just four weeks of filming, Girard left the production, citing “differences in interpretation” as the reason. He was replaced by Lee H. Katzin and went uncredited in the final film.
Producer Robert Aldrich also had plans to make a final “What Ever Happened to” film based on the novel Goodbye, Aunt Elva by Elizabeth Fenwick, but the project never materialized.
Despite a mostly positive reception, the film was a financial loss for the studio. Today, What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice has a cult horror status and has been named by Edgar Wright as one of his 1000 favorite films.
Escape from Amityville is a limited series podcast event happening exclusively during October of 2021! Starting October 1st, we will review one movie every other day. Each movie will be a lesser known or appreciated, but culturally significant, horror movie made within the past 100 years. None of these movies have anything to do with the original tale of America's most haunted house, but in the spirit of the Amityville story, we promise to review chilling and horrifying movies featuring demons, monsters, and various ghouls! 15 episodes in total! The series finale takes place on Halloween night with a special mystery review. Fans of Giant Monster BS and/or Horror films will be right at home with this podcast. Vulgar, brutally honest, scary as hell, oh yeah... it's Escape from Amityville time Baby!
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