This extremely tasty 1969 black comedy mystery chiller is producer Robert Aldrich’s third Grand Guignol horror film after What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964).

However, this time there is no Bette Davis as star and Aldrich hands over the direction to Lee H Katzin, who has no trouble stirring up the atmosphere and tension in Theodore Apstein’s screenplay based on the novel The Forbidden Garden by Ursula Curtiss, in which Tucson, Arizona, widow Claire Marrable (Geraldine Page) makes a bad habit of bumping off the home help for their money and burying the bodies in the garden.

But now Aunt Alice (lovely old Ruth Gordon) turns up at Mrs Marrable’s home to take on the job of housekeeper so that she can find out what happened to her missing widow...

Writer-director-co-producer Bryan Forbes directed this extraordinary, spine-tingling psychological thriller about a near insane medium. Seance on a Wet Afternoon is an exciting work of a gifted British film-maker in his creative prime in 1964.

Kim Stanley stars as Myra Savage, frustrated because she has received little professional recognition, who conceives a shocking scheme to win acclaim for her psychic powers. But her real trouble is that she is also dominated by her relationship with the spirit of her son Arthur, who died at birth, the cause of her mentally instability.

Richard Attenborough also stars as her weak, unemployed but devoted husband Billy, whom she involves in a plot to kidnap Amanda Clayton, the adolescent daughter of a wealthy couple, so that she can appear to trace th...

Joan Crawford: ‘You wouldn’t be able to do these awful things to me if I weren’t still in this [wheel]chair.’ Bette Davis: ‘Butcha ARE, Blanche, ya ARE !’

Finally together on screen, lifetime Hollywood arch-rivals Davis and Crawford thrillingly play out their real-life divine feud to the max in this horrifically twisted tale of sibling rivalry. A brilliant black comedy chiller, it’s a uniquely haunting, eerie, grotesque movie. It’s stylishly directed by a sadistically inclined seeming Robert Aldrich, all too apparently relishing his coruscating misogyny.

Davis, deservedly landing her 10th Oscar nomination gives a lip-smacking tour-de-force of astonishing venom and pathos. Abandoning herself to all the extremes of the character, Davis gives a performance of the utmost bravery...