What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
Directed by Robert Aldrich
A former vaudeville child star viciously torments her paraplegic sister in their decaying Hollywood mansion.
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What critics compared What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? to
Meanwhile, the film pays tribute to Robert Aldrich's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1965) in a bizarre, wax-figure movie theater scene.
Up the road from the cinema (where "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" is the seemingly perpetual offering) is Trudy's House of Wax, a grotesquerie of morbid history and familial horrors.
Clearly inspired by the millennium-defining Munchausen by proxy case of all — that of Gypsy Rose Blanchard — “Run” has more in common with “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” than Hitchcock, operating at the clip of a runaway train.
Run brings to mind another horror-thriller about a character in a wheelchair held captive: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
How far things have come since “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” and the cliché of the helpless invalid at the mercy of her caregiver!
That leads to an absolutely batshit crescendo worthy of the legacy of films that Run piggy backs on from What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? and the other Hulu series The Act .
Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins deliver a sit-back-and-marvel double-act masterclass that will be spoken of in the same breath as Travolta and Jackson in Pulp Fiction or Davis and Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins deliver a sit-back-and-marvel double-act masterclass that will be spoken of in the same breath as De Niro and Pacino in Heat or Davis and Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
The set-up of "The Baby" also echoes "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" and some of the other "hag horror" California Gothic movies inspired by Robert Aldrich's hit.
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Fonda delivers a high voltage and tantalisingly short cameo; it plays like she’s channelling the spirit of Bette Davis circa What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in a vignette from Mulholland Drive.
As onlookers emerge from the hills, the stands begin to overflow with a generation’s worth of Warner Brothers’ characters — including Jane Hudson from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Alex’s droogs from A Clockwork Orange, and, for some reason, the nuns from Ken Russell’s The Devils.
That fact that the horrific-looking thing resembles Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? seems not to concern them in the slightest.
When John gives Mia an antique girl doll named Annabelle (no relation to the actress), neither of them notices its face is a mask of malevolence, like Bette Davis’ in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”
The doll, which bears more than a casual resemblance to Bette Davis’s character in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,” is creepily inanimate, and Leonetti uses it to good effect.
Moody, narcissistic, and socially awkward, Alice Klieg has to be the most intolerable movie heroine to come along since Bette Davis and Joan Crawford's Hudson sisters from 1962's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
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Instead of pulling his inspirations from the late ’60s and early ’70s genre films, this time around, they come from the pictures made during Hollywood’s Golden Age and the technicolor phenomena — “The Wizard of Oz,” “Psycho,” “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,” “Sunset Boulevard,” and the melodramas of Douglas Sirk (“All That Heaven Allows,” “Magnificent Obsession”).
X war eine Hommage an die Slasher- und Pornofilme der Siebziger, während Pearl mehr mit Wizard of Oz , What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? und Douglas-Sirk-Melodramen gemein hat.
If Bardem is nothing else, he is certainly the scariest actor in a pageboy haircut since Bette Davis made "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?"