Rant 2,392: Goin' Back

This weekend was a pretty quiet one for my family and I.

On Sunday, we had our highlight, as my wife and I, with our son, celebrated our anniversary.

We went to a local diner--something we almost never, ever do--and had a very good meal indeed.

We just never go to a diner for a meal out because usually, we have found that you get diner food with that diner taste, but last night, we were really happy with what we had, so it all worked out just fine.

What did we do the rest of the weekend?

We basically prepared for the upcoming Father's Day celebration, where we are expected to have a houseful of people from both sides of our family, so we bought some food and some other things which we will use to celebrate the day.

Other than that, with my wife working on Saturday, we didn't do too much.

On Saturday night, with very little on television, my wife and I watched a real golden oldie from the early 1970s coming out of England, "Who Slew Auntie Roo," starring Shelley Winters and then red-hot kid actor Mark Lester, who looked about nine years old but was actually 13 when this was filmed in 1971.

The film, directed by Curtis Harrington with writing credits to four different writers, is actually a retelling of the old Hansel and Gretel story, done in a 1970s chilling fashion.

In what looks like the early 1900s, an older, seemingly wealthy widow--played to the hilt by Winters--annually has children from an orphanage over for Christmas, where she bestows on them dinner, a sleepover, and gifts galore.

But two children from the orphanage--Lester and a kid actress playing his sister who was so annoying that I won't even mention her name--who were not among the invited children show up anyway, and the little girl--one of the most annoying child actresses I can ever remember, with a cloying voice and way about her--quickly becomes the favorite of the widow, for reasons we are about to soon learn.

Lester and his sister get into entanglements with their initial stay at the widow's house--more a mansion than anything else--and eventually, we find out that Winters sees the little girl as the spitting image of her own dead daughter, who a few years earlier had slid down a banister in the house, fallen off of it, and died right on the spot.

The old widow never got over the loss of her daughter, and she can't get over the loss to the extent that she never buried her daughter, keeping her remains in a coffin in one of the rooms.

One thing leads to another, and the brother and sister are kidnapped by Winters, locked in a room, and given food to make them fat. The old lady is not letting these kids go, but the two children find a way to finally get out, set the house on fire, and kill the old lady. They are not charged with anything, but in the process, stole all the jewels from the widow, and they walk away pretty much scot-clean from anything.

The movie was OK at best, and Winters steals the show as the old widow. The children are annoying, very nasty kids, and you cannot have very much sympathy for them, and that is one major failure of the movie, that you almost want the kids to go up in smoke with the widow when her house burns down, because these kids are really so nasty to her and to everyone they run into.

I would give the film a B for effort but a C- for execution, so the film gets an overall C from me. You can clearly see why the movie needed four writers, because it is kind of messy, but I do have to say that it is worth viewing just to see Winters' performance. She alone lifts the movie to that C level; in the hands of a lesser actress, this would have been a total disaster.

So there you have it; a dinner and a movie, split up by 24 hours but taken together, made for an OK weekend.

And I will not be here at my usual perch tomorrow, because I have some personal business to take care of, but I will be back on Wednesday with another glowing Rant.

Speak to you again then.