The Scare Salon

The film was very clearly made to cash in on the massive success of Baby Jane, and probably would be accused of being a Psycho ripoff if it hadn’t been written by Psycho scribe himself, Robert Bloch. Seeing Joan Crawford playing a crazy axe murderer seemed like it would be a damn good time, so I fired up Tubi and gave that sucker a watch.

And honestly, I was surprised how relatively restrained it was, despite its somewhat lurid premise. The opening scene was a tad over the top, but after that, it turned into a fairly gripping psychological horror tale with some terrific acting performances. Anyone who’s at all familiar with the horror genre will likely guess the “twist” very early on in the story, but that didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the film at all (though your mileage may vary). In fact, the narrative reminded me somewhat of the later movie Psycho II from 1983, which was written by Tom Holland (Robert Bloch had actually written a sequel to his 1959 novel Psycho in 1982, but the movie wasn’t based on that).

Anyway, back to Strait-Jacket. We begin with a flashback as Lucy Harbin (Joan Crawford) comes home early from a trip and finds her husband (played by Lee Majors in his first [uncredited] film appearance) in bed with another woman (an uncredited Patricia Crest). Furious, Lucy grabs an axe from a stump outside and hacks both their heads off. The couple’s daughter Carol, who’s about three years old and is played by an uncredited Vicki Cos, sees the whole incident from her bedroom across the hall, her eyes wide with horror. Shortly afterward, Lucy is dragged off to an asylum, screaming and clad in the titular garment.

We then jump ahead twenty years. Daughter Carol is now all grown up and played by Diane Baker (who’s been in a million things but was instantly recognizable as Senator Ruth Martin from Silence of the Lambs). She’s telling the story of the axe murder to her boyfriend Michael (John Anthony Hayes) in order to prime him for the imminent release of her mother from the asylum. Since her mother was sent away, Carol has been living with her aunt Emily (Rochelle Hudson) and uncle Bill (Leif Erickson), who have set up a studio for her on their farm so she can do her sculpting. The farm also employs an obvious red herring handyman named Leo, who is played by George Kennedy and is such an overt creep that you just know he’s not guilty of a single thing.

An ostensibly cured Lucy arrives on the farm, and though it’s a tad uncomfortable at first, Carol’s warm reception eventually makes her feel a bit more relaxed. Lucy looks about as dowdy as you’d expect her to after spending twenty years in a mental hospital, but she also seems much calmer, if still very unsure of herself.

Carol excitedly shows Lucy a bust she made of her mother’s face, and a photo album she compiled with pictures of her and her mom from her childhood. She also shows Lucy that she has kept Lucy’s jangly charm bracelets that she happened to be wearing when she did the axe murder, and it’s clear the sound they make is pretty triggering for Lucy. Carol apologizes for showing them to her, but then says that she would really love it if Lucy looked and dressed more like she did when Carol was young, so she would appear as Carol remembered her (I don’t think it was ever mentioned whether Carol had visited Lucy while she was in the asylum). This is a weird request, but Lucy is so desperate to reconnect with her daughter that she agrees to do just that.

So Carol takes her mom out shopping, buying her a dress and some jewelry in a style more like what she wore twenty years ago, and also getting her a wig in the same color and style as her hair used to be back in the day. Lucy isn’t sure she’s on board with all this, but Carol seems so eager that she goes along. While they’re out shopping, though, Lucy thinks she hears some little girls outside the shop singing a rhyme about the axe murder she did (which is basically the Lizzie Borden rhyme, just with the name replaced). When she goes out to confront them, however, they’re singing a different rhyme. Hmmm…could it be that Lucy is perhaps not as cured as her doctor believed she was and is starting to have hallucinations?

For a while, it would seem so, because later that night, after everyone has gone to bed, Lucy wakes up and sees her husband’s severed head and that of his mistress lying on the pillow beside her, as well as a bloody axe. She freaks the hell out, as you would, but when Bill, Emily, and Carol follow her back to her room, there’s nothing there. Lucy understandably starts to think that she might be losing it.

Carol, though, insists that Lucy’s going to be just fine, and that they all just need to be patient with her as she readjusts. This opinion also seems to be shared by uncle Bill (who is Lucy’s brother), though aunt Emily seems a bit more skeptical.

Carol also thinks it would help her mom tremendously if Michael came over for a drink to get to know her. Lucy protests, saying she’s really not ready to be meeting people just yet, but Carol eventually persuades her. There then unfolds an extremely awkward encounter where Lucy comes out in all her young-Lucy duds, quaffs back a couple whiskeys, and starts very audaciously seducing Michael right in front of Carol. The whole excruciating incident is thankfully halted by the arrival of Lucy’s physician, Dr. Anderson (Mitchell Cox), who says he was on his way to go fishing for his vacation and thought he’d stop by to check on Lucy.

Lucy is still wearing the young-Lucy outfit and is acting all flirty and sexual toward the doctor, and he becomes alarmed, thinking perhaps she was indeed released too soon. He tells Bill and Emily that it would probably be best if she was taken back to the hospital, but Lucy doesn’t react well to the idea and runs out of the house.

Not long afterward, the doctor is out looking for Lucy in a barn on the property, and gets axed to death by someone seen only in shadow, but almost certainly Lucy and her jangly bracelets. Later still, Carol comes into the house and finds her mother, back in her dowdy clothes, sitting in the darkened living room. She claims she fell asleep, and when Carol asks where the doctor is, Lucy says he left. Carol glances out the window and sees his car is still parked out front, though, and when Lucy says some sideways shit about the young-Lucy clothes making her act different, Carol assumes that her mother has killed the doctor. Since Carol doesn’t want her mother to go back to the hospital, she decides to hide the doctor’s car in the barn and pretend he was never there, even lying to his office staff when they call wondering where he is.

Problem is that Leo the handyman saw what Carol was up to, and rightly deduces that the doctor was murdered. He brazenly takes the car out of the barn and starts repainting it, stating that the car is his now, and when Carol berates him and tells him he’s fired, he smugly tells her that he knows Lucy murdered the doctor and he’s going to tell the police what happened unless he’s allowed to stay on the farm as long as he wants to. Lucy overhears this whole conversation, and unsurprisingly, Leo also turns up dead in short order.

Now, aside from all the axe murdering going on willy-nilly, there’s also a whole plot sideline of Carol and Michael wanting to get married, but being afraid that Michael’s uber-wealthy parents, Mr. and Mrs. Fields (Howard St. John and Edith Atwater, respectively) won’t approve, especially after they find out about Lucy’s murder record and subsequent incarceration. The Fields’ have invited Carol, Lucy, Bill, and Emily to dinner at their grand mansion one evening, and Carol and Michael speculate that they might announce their engagement then, after the Fields’ meet Lucy.

The first part of the dinner party isn’t shown, but we’re thrown immediately into Lucy having a panic attack in one of the bathrooms in the mansion. Carol comes to help her, and it turns out that a nervous Lucy spilled coffee on herself, and is mortified that the Fields’ think she’s some kind of weirdo. Carol reassures her that it was no big deal and everything is fine, ultimately getting the coffee stain out of the dress and guiding her mother back into the dining room.

Everything seems to be going all right after that, but then Lucy is left alone with the Fields’ and lets it slip that Michael and Carol are engaged, which she didn’t know she wasn’t supposed to mention. The Fields’ get very aggravated, basically saying in no uncertain terms that Carol is not going to be marrying their son. Lucy gets a bit riled up, angrily admitting that yes, she was in an insane asylum, but that doesn’t mean that Carol isn’t good enough for their golden boy. She then tells them straight out that she wants Carol to be happy, and she isn’t going to let the Fields’ snobbery fuck things up for her daughter. She then storms righteously out of the house.

After the Fields’ tell everyone else what happened, Michael takes Emily and Carol back home, then he and Bill go out looking for Lucy. Mr. and Mrs. Fields, troubled by the evening’s events, start getting ready for bed, but Mr. Fields is axed to death in his closet upstairs by that same shadowed person with the jangly bracelets. Mrs. Fields, suspecting something is wrong, goes up and finds his bloody corpse, but before she can escape the room and call the authorities, Lucy pops out and threatens her with the axe.

However, as many of you might have guessed by now, this is where the big twist is revealed. Moments later, the real Lucy comes into the bedroom, having returned to the house to apologize to the Fields’ for her outburst earlier. She sees the other Lucy and tackles her onto the bed, only to discover that it is actually, surprise surprise, Carol wearing an identical dress and wig to Lucy’s, and wearing a mask of Lucy’s face that she made from the bust she sculpted. Turns out that it’s been Carol hacking people up all along but trying to pin the murders on Lucy so she’ll be sent back to the asylum. Carol had even gone so far as to put fake severed heads in her mom’s bed to freak her out, and play recordings of little girls singing the Lizzie Borden rhyme so Lucy would think she was hearing things. Carol’s ultimate plan was to kill both the Fields’ so that she and Michael would be free to marry and they’d inherit all the money as well, but of course she was stopped before she could complete her mission.

After the whole scheme is unraveled and Michael sees what an absolute lunatic his girlfriend is, she is likewise shipped off to the same mental hospital her mother spent so much of her life in. At the end, Lucy tells Bill and Emily that she is going back to the asylum willingly too, so that she can finally be there for her daughter the way she never was before.

As I said, this was a solid little horror film, not at all as melodramatic or cheesy as I was expecting from a William Castle movie starring Joan Crawford. The acting was great all around, and the story had a real heart to it, particularly in Joan Crawford’s performance as Lucy and the way she played against Diane Baker as Carol. If I had one slight criticism, it would be that it was pretty obvious that Carol was the killer very early on in the movie (I figured it out right as Carol became insistent about dressing her mother up in her young-style clothes and showing her the bracelets), but it was still an entertaining watch in spite of that.

If you’re interested in horror films from this era and want to see something that was inspired by Psycho but has its own slightly lower-rent charm, then Strait-Jacket might be your cup of tea. Come to think of it, it would make a great double feature with Francis Ford Coppola’s first film, Dementia 13, another low-budget Psycho homage featuring an axe murderer (though produced by Roger Corman instead of William Castle).

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.