Criminally Insane

Criminally Insane

Criminally Insane

Criminally Insane

"Criminally Insane" is an effective horror film, so anything else you'd like to call it (such as tasteless or crude or exploitative) is superfluous. Director Nick Millard might not have had any money, but he had intelligence and heart and a flair for storytelling--and he obtained a bravura performance from Priscilla Alden as Ethel. (Also good are Lisa Farros as Ethel's pitiable sister and George 'Buck' Flower as the businesslike cop.) In anyone else's hands a movie like this would have become a hopeless grotesquerie, but Millard gave it psychological depth; you'll find yourself wondering what he might have been able to do with an actual budget as you watch the jarring fantasy scenes near the end. One of the best American films of its type, right up there with David Durston's "I Drink Your Blood".

Fat Ethel Janowski enjoys eating a lot.After staying in an asylum and having electro shocks therapy Ethel is released to live with her grandmother.Ethel wants to eat and her grandma tries to stop Ethel's eating habits.Ethel murders her grandmother with a kitchen knife and she can eat peacefully as much as she wants.In the meantime more murders take place.Technically crude,raw and suitably unsettling cult psycho-slasher about murderous obese woman.The gore effects are lame,the blood looks like a red paint,but the central performance of Priscilla Alden is great.I haven't seen the sequel of "Criminally Insane" or "Death Nurse" movies,but someday I will.8 out of 10.Don't mess with Crazy Fat Ethel.She will butcher you with meat cleaver and eat your tasty flesh.

This attempt at film-making was really too much. This really is Trash with a capital "T". It also carries a simple lesson in life: Never put an overly fat, retarded woman (who's one desire in life is to eat constantly) on a diet. Because she'll go berserk and slaughter everyone coming in reach of her chubby claws. That's the plot of this film, and I can't exactly say it makes up for an exciting viewing. Just imagine an enormous piece of woman performing various actions like killing a victim, dragging bodies up and down the stairs, moving her butt out of the sofa to answer the door, etc. I mean, it takes ages for her to get anything done, so that should warn you about the movie's pace. I imagine the only thing she can really do in the blink of an eye, is eating a pie. A horrible piece of awful rubbish. Acting that reaches new, unimaginable depths. Be on the look-out for George "Buck" Flower (with no beard) as a detective. As soon as he opens his mouth, you'll be convinced that the man couldn't act his way one inch into a scene even if his life depended on it. The "gory killings" totally fail to have any upsetting effect, as they are so ineptly staged and the blood is clearly some red paint they threw around on the set and smeared some victims with. People just keep showing up at her doorstep (including her slutty sister, who doesn't look like anything remotely "sexy" either), and the fat trollop just keeps on killing everybody while stuffing herself with food. She just piles the bodies up in bedrooms, stinking up the whole place. Anybody who smells anything? Wack & slash, and the poor bastards die too. Surprisingly, while this film can't move any slower to its "shocking" denouement (which you can see coming from the moment Fat Ethel makes her first kill), I didn't really get bored sitting through this piece of excrement. I never thought a steaming pile of celluloid turd could actually be this fascinating. And no matter how you look at it, once you've seen it, you won't forget it. If you think you can handle a fine example of bad taste in film-making, then this is the film for you. One of the ugliest films I've seen in a long time. Take this as a compliment or a warning; you be the judge. Good Badness? Yes, very much, if only for its aka title being "Crazy Fat Ethel". 2/10 and 8/10

Criminally Insane (1975) ** 1/2 (out of 4) The title pretty much sums up this incredibly bizarre, politically incorrect exploitation film that fans should really eat up. 300 pound plus Ethyl gets out of an insane asylum but she's outraged that people want her to go on a diet so she starts killing anyone who gets between her and food. Running just over 60-minutes this film is technically pretty bad but the outrageous subject matter makes for a very fun movie in the same vein of a John Waters film. There's plenty of violence and fake blood to make you giggle, although the "joke" of an obese person killing gets old after the thirty-minute mark. Criminally Insane 2 (1987) BOMB (out of 4) Incredibly horror film that ranks as one of the worst ever made. Like many "sequels" of the 80s, this here takes about forty-minutes worth of footage from the first film and adds 20-minutes worth of new footage, which was all shot on a camcorder. Even the opening and closing credits were lifted from the first film!!!

It's not easy to call Criminally Insane a movie. It felt like a cheap, poorly edited, no money video tape from Hollywood Video that was thrown about, lightly kicked, had some of the tape tugged at, was thrown around again, was sat at a dinner table and smeared with a bunch of crap, and then kicked around again. It felt old and broken. Not good at all, not even in a trash cinema way. It was just bad. And stupid. And long (even though it's an hour long.) F.

"Criminally Insane" is one those movies so uncompromisingly itself that watching it becomes almost an "arthouse" movie experience. The dreariness and awfulness never let up, even for an instant, and the cheapness of the production ends up working in the movie's favor and increasing the impact. I have to rate it a "2", because, let's face it, "Criminally Insane" is TERRIBLE. Compared to this movie, John Waters made Disney comedies (because as awful as his film families were, the members seemed to care about and love each other) and Herschel Gordon Lewis was making Cole Porter musicals. But I will admit - watching this for the first time is a memorable experience.

I don't know if I should call this a cult classic but something for sure it's obscure guilty pleasure status. Priscila Alden steals the show as the mentally unstable Ethel. The woman will do anything for her food! Heck, she even kills her granny in a painfully (literally) scene. She finishes anyone that gets on her way. She's criminally insane because she's released from a mental institution sooner than expected and she demonstrates she's not ready for society! The direction is cheap, cheap but with a heart. The director focuses all the time on Ethel's behavior and at some point you can say that character development was intended. The score is disturbing on it's own way. There's an orchestra in the likes of "Friday the 13th". It worked for the movie's "intense" scenes. My problem with "Criminally Insane" are the poor dialogs. Ethel's one liners in almost all death scenes is terrible. The rest of the dialogs between her and the rest of the cast are really bad. The low production values need to be recognized because it seems that the producers' intention was to create a serious B-Horror movie. I recommend "Criminally Insane" for people who can stand a (short) period of boredom with the usual but few must-see scenes. If you don't enjoy the greatness of a B-movie, then avoid this like the plague. If you like to watch extremely low budget movies with zero production values but that try too hard, give this movie a chance.