Never Visit the In-Laws

I have fun delving through the older catalogs for studios. My tastes lean towards horror, and because of that (and the fact that I run Castlevania: The Inverted Dungeon, which is just filled with horror reviews) I tend to see a lot of classic horror. I’ll let whatever the various streamers suggest dictate what I watch, finding an eclectic mix of 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s horror to fill my day (especially when I have some project I’m working on and need something going on that I can split focus on and keep my brains from leaking out my ears).

Hammer Horror is one of my favorites because the classic British studio used to produce a wide range of dependable horror stories. You could always rely on them for solid acting and good (if still well budgeted) production values. The stories weren’t always the best, but Hammer delivered when it came to ambiance, and I like that. Plus, sometimes they’d have great movie titles that made you want to watch their films. I’m a sucker for a eye-catching movie title, such as when I suffered through a terrible “The Pit and the Pendulum” adaptation because it was called The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism. What’s not to love about that blatantly over-the-top title?

And such was the case with another title I watched not too long ago. It was a Hammer film, suggested by Amazon PrimeWhile Netflix might be the largest streaming seervice right now, other major contenders have come into the game. One of the biggest, and best funded, is Amazon Prime, the streaming-service add-on packing with free delivery and all kinds of other perks Amazon gives its members. And, with the backing of its corporate parent, this streaming service very well could become the market leader., called Die! Die! My Darling! Again, that’s just an objectively great, exploitation style title, and I knew I had to watch it. I was a little disappointed when I learned that the original, British title was just Fanatic, but it just goes to show sometimes American cinemas had the right idea when they retitled films (see also: Road Warrior, which is a much more evocative title than simple Mad Max 2).

Of course, the reason why no one remembers Fanatic (or the glorious Die! Die! My Darling!) anymore is because the film sucks. It’s not necessarily a bad horror film, getting by on solid ambiance and a daringness to actually try and push boundaries a little. But the fact of the matter is that the film requires its lead character to be incredibly stupid, making a series of bad decisions that locks her on a path she can’t escape from. And because of that, it’s hard to really invest in her character, one way or another. Adding on a little sexism and poor gender politics as well certainly doesn’t help the film. It’s a movie that I doubt would be made now (unless it were made by Tyler Perry Productions and had an obviously coded message about religion and marriage included) just because of how its story plays out. Certainly, for most audiences, this film will fall very flat.

Patricia Carroll (Stefanie Powers) is an expat from America, here in England to marry her fiancé, Alan Glentower (Maurice Kaufmann). However, before she can go through the wedding, she feels that she has to take care of a small matter out in the countryside. She used to be engaged to Stephen Trefoile, and now that the man is dead she wants to visit his mother, Mrs. Trefoile (Tallulah Bankhead) and pay her respects. She calls ahead to arrange a brief visit with the woman, swearing she’ll be back in London by the evening.

Except when she gets there Mrs. Trefoile demands that she stay for dinner… and then stay overnight so that the two of them can go to church and pray for the deceased. And then, after, Mrs. Trefoile keeps acting like Patricia will be staying around, making demands on the girl, forcing her to change the way she dresses, the way she acts, her very behaviors. Eventually Mrs. Trefoile reveals that she intends to keep Patricia there, at the rundown family estate, and that her servants – Peter Vaughan as Harry, Yootha Joyce as Anna, and Donald Sutherland as Joseph – will help keep the woman imprisoned, all because Patricia was engaged to Stephen and, in Mrs. Trefoile’s mind, that means they were basically married, and marriage is for eternity. Patricia needs to find a way to escape, post haste, lest she disappear into the countryside forever under the heel of this crazy woman.

I certainly do think there are people that think like this, in fairness. A certain contingent of religious folks (not all of them, but certain groups) do think that marriage transcends death, and that two people that commit to each other have to stay together forever, even if one person dies. The film doesn’t engage with the content in that form, though, as Patricia and Stephen never officially married, so the film does already set this up as a situation where Mrs. Trefoile is in the wrong and Patricia clearly already needs to escape, immediately. It does feel like if the film approached this subject from a different angle slightly, it might at least engage with the material in a more interesting way. At the very least it could have a better discussion about how long a marriage lasts past the death of a partner in a way that doesn’t make one of the two women seem outright insane right from the get go.

I think that’s a major issue with Fanatic (or whatever title you want to apply to the film). The very fact that Mrs. Trefoile is a religious fanatic means that we never view her as an entity to listen to. Almost from the moment Patricia steps into the house things feel off. The older woman makes demands and goes on and on about religion, and the film tips its hand pretty early. It would have been better if the film had let the woman seem sane enough for a little while before it started having her descend into her madness, putting on a false front to lure Patricia in. At least then the film could build tension before Patricia is locked away in the house as a prisoner.

Of course, it would also be helpful if the film didn’t have Patricia act like an idiot. She goes off, hours away from her fiancé, to a town she doesn’t know, to meet a woman she never met. If she knew Stephen well enough (she was engaged to him so you’d think she would have) then you’d think she’d also know what kind of woman she was meeting and, presumably, she’d have wanted some kind of backup. Even if he didn’t go to the mother’s house with Patricia, Alan should have ridden up with her and stayed at the local pub for a couple of hours before heading over to retrieve her. That just seems like a smart, safe thing anyone doing this kind of trip would do.

But even then, Patricia has multiple moments where she could just leave, grab her things and walk off, and no one would have had a chance to stop her. Instead, she waits a couple of days, gets mad at the woman, announces she is leaving and that she and Stephen had dissolved their engagement and she didn’t really love him anyway, and triggers the woman so hard that she essentially begs the woman to retaliate. Like, I’m not trying to victim blame here, but Patricia didn’t really seem to understand deescalation or picking her moment at all. There were better ways to handle the situation, at every turn, and Patricia easily chooses the dumbest way possible, time and again.

But then the film also makes the biggest mistake it could: it doesn’t even let Patricia solve her own problem. She got herself into this mess, one would reason, so she should find her own way out as a kind of character arc. Instead, though, Alan wanders to town looking for her since she’s been missing for a few days, and it's Alan that defeats the bad guys and rescues his lover. Not only does this steal all of Patricia’s agency (which she’s been working to build this whole film) it undercuts all reason to care about her at all. She can’t save herself, she’s just a damsel. It doesn’t work.

As handsome and well acted as this film is (as you’d expect from a Hammer film) the fact of the matter is that Fanatic is hobbled by a bad story that treats its lead character terribly. It takes its lead character and treats her like an idiot, having her dig herself into her problem deeper and deeper when there were so many obvious ways she could have avoided or escaped it. There’s a version of this story we could devise, I’m sure, that lets Patricia sink in better without even realizing she’s in danger, but then the most logical version of this film has Patricia go to the Trefoile estate with Alan waiting nearby, and the whole story is over in fifteen minutes. That wouldn’t make for much of a movie, but it would be much more reasonable and it wouldn’t treat its lead character like a complete idiot.