gridoon2018 Joan Crawford chews the scenery enjoyably in this "Psycho"-influenced shocker (by the same writer!) which has its effective moments (some of them deliciously lurid) but is talky and unevenly paced - and the final twist is precictable. OK for one watch - but there is little need for revisiting it. **1/2 out of 4.

bbickley13-921-58664 The movie was campy, but it was a good choice by William Castle to get Joan Crawford to play the main character. She was seasoned in years by the time she did the film but she still looks good. I notice that Castle did not use any gimmicks in this movie except for her. How much the star has fallen for an Oscar winning actress to do b-grade horror.A step up from his last movie with a similar Hitchcock premise to it, homicidal, Crawford plays a woman who spent 20 years in a loony bin for killing her husband and his lover with an Axe. Attempting to get her life together and bond with the daughter she left behind, Joan's character Lucy finds herself slowly going insane again.The movie is way more develop than homicidal and is given justice by Crawford's acting skills, despite how outdated some of the dialog is. Watching her Axe her husband in the beginning was worth the watch overall.

bkoganbing After playing the head nurse in an insane asylum in The Caretakers, Joan Crawford must have decided to see how the other side lived so her next film was Strait-Jacket where she was a mental patient. What got her committed was her Lizzie Borden like attitude toward her second husband Lee Majors whom she dispatched along with his girlfriend with an ax. Her daughter who grows up to be Diane Baker saw the horror show as a child.But Joan's much better now and she's gone to live with Baker and her brother Leif Ericksen and sister-in-law Rochelle Hudson. Baker's about to get married to John Anthony Hayes a real blue blood whose parents are understandably curious about the girl he's marrying and her family. The parents are Howard St. John and Edith Atwater. When some bodies start occurring again as the result of 40 whacks they get downright concerned.After what she did in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane both Crawford and her arch rival Bette Davis got inundated with slasher flick offers. After doing The Caretakers this probably was the best thing Crawford was offered. But said to say it started her career tobogganing down the hill of mediocrity.Her last films were truly not worthy of mainstay star whose career began in silent films. If you're dedicated to Joan Crawford or slasher flicks see Strait-Jacket, otherwise I wouldn't bother.

Robert J. Maxwell It may help to be a Joan Crawford fan in order to enjoy this inexpensive slasher/thriller. I guess I'm not a big enough fan because I found "Straight-Jacket" almost ludicrous. I don't HATE Joan Crawford. It's just that, as an actress, she's pretty pedestrian. I'm afraid I feel the same way about that other actress in the Pantheon, Greta Garbo. Bette Davis had some flair and flash, and she made a couple of good movies although she was never a stunner. But Joan Crawford? The best thing I've seen her do is suffer under Bette Davis's sadism in "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" The worst of her acting appears when she's required to signal an emotion -- "disbelief," "anger," "sadness," "lying," "seductiveness", "lunacy" -- whatever. It's as if a switch in her internal milieu is toggled and she occupies the psychological state. And she holds onto it like a yoga position. On top of that, she was a terrible mother if you believe even half of her daughter's memoirs.However, she fits rather well into this schlock axe-murderer movie. She's recently released from a booby hatch after slaughtering two people who have offended her. Her daughter, the excessively sweet Diane Baker takes her in. But Baker owns a farm, and it's a chicken farm and there are a lot of chickens and axes around. Then there is the handyman, the greasy, disheveled, snaggletoothed George Kennedy -- but we don't get to worry about his being the murderer for long.And there ARE murders. Two people get it in the neck. I more or less figured out who was doing it about half-way through the movie without trying very hard. In between pages of Will Durant's "Story of Philosophy" as a matter of fact, which I can recommend heartily because it actually has almost as many laughs as this movie. Those eloquent 1926 locutions of Durant's! Reminded me of another classic, Paul de Kruif's "Microbe Hunters", written in the same year. Hilarious stuff. Haven't laughed so hard since my last visit to the proctologist.Where was I? The mind wanders compulsively when it tries to focus on Joan Crawford garbed in a flowered dress, adorned with jangling bangles, wearing a hideous black wig, and staring wild-eyed at the axe in George Kennedy's sweaty hand.This isn't bad enough to be funny. Few films are. It's just an inexpensive melodrama enlivened by a couple of shadows showing a swinging axe. Oh -- and the Pepsi-Cola on prominent display.