BUTCHER, BAKER, NIGHTMARE MAKER
Aunt Maniac
RELEASED OUT NOW! 1981 | 18 | 4K/blu-ray
Director William Asher
Cast Jimmy Mcnichol, Susan Tyrrell,
Bo Svenson, Marcia Lewis
BLU-RAY DEBUT If you sat John Waters down and made him watch all 72 titles on the DPP list, this would surely be his fave. Featuring surely cinema’s only deployment of Chekhov’s pickles, it’s by some distance the campest of the films to earn “video nasty” status.
An early gore gag secured that: when a couple’s car runs into a lumber truck, a log knocks the driver’s block off. Otherwise, it’s bewildering to think that this is a film that was subject to seizure by the police – pitched at a hysterical level, it can’t be taken seriously.
After coming home to find the aunt who raised him stabbing a TV repairman to death, young Billy (Jimmy Mcnichol) falls under suspicion from a cop whose vicious homophobia blinds him to the real explanation…
Bo Svenson is eminently hissable as a blockheaded bully who gets the comeuppance he richly deserves. Susan Tyrell, meanwhile, pulls out all the stops as the controlling Aunt Cheryl.
Words can’t do justice to her performance, a spiralling into bug-eyed madness given shape through an increasingly twisted physicality. One of those films that has to be seen to be believed.
Extras New interviews with Svenson (10 minutes), the DOP (15 minutes) and the editor
(17 minutes) convey what a seat-of-the-pants production this was, due to the dismissal of the original director. Severin Films also treat us to three new commentaries (Mcnichol, the writers and the production manager). But the highlight is tucked away in a bunch of archival interviews (five in all): 11 priceless moments of the late Susan Tyrell’s reactions as she watches the film. Pulling faces and yelping, she seems only marginally less deranged than her character; it closes with Tyrell removing her artificial leg. Plus: trailer; TV spot. Ian Berriman
A misplaced squib bag going off by his kidney led to Bo Svenson spending time in hospital, after he began peeing blood.