I swear this is one of those bad horror movies that hates you right back.. What can one say about this mouldy old curio left in the sun too long that hasn't already been said? Well if you go for weird soft core porn hippie atmospherics despite most of the cast being quite sexually unappealing and in fact ugly as sin, as well as unintentional comedy mostly derived from the wooden actors and their hilariously awkward and clunky dialogue, then this one is most assuredly for you! For just over an hour it feels like a ~really~ long and stretched-out period of time. It looks like a public access television movie, action-wise it's extremely limp stuff with many scenes going nowhere, the pacing is slower than a crawling snail, it gets very dull and dry a whole lot, and I don't think I've ever seen a film with a bigger assortment of lame and/or annoying characters in my life, every conversation is absurdly blah and long-winded and the whole thing is pure trash, but that's what made me laugh the most, I actually enjoyed it as an early proto-slasher oddity, and it worked for me. It chugs along like a broken down old barge, but it knows where it's going and it gets ya there in the bitter end! There's a considerable frustration factor but there's a balance between the enjoyably bad and awful, and for me this was mostly tacky fun than anything else. It's annoying but it's the kind of annoying that compels you to keep watching just to see how it ends. I mean yeah it's a beyond cheap crap-fest but damn it, like Ethel herself there's a certain blunt as drywall charm there and it carries itself very well! Definitely one to chuck on the so-bad-it's-good pile! It's frightfully humble, it ain't Freddy or Jason, it's just Ethel, she lives to eat, she's insane and if you get between her and food you're dead, simple as, and the character was no deeper than that! I really liked that gal, purely because she was so very unlikeable. Her stony expression and rude manner just made me smile, reminded me of a gargoyle! Her method of murder was to chop at the people but then politely stop at the last second just before reaching their heads and then lightly tap with a muffled thud sound. And the whole act is shot in one badly-edited motion that made me bust out laughing every time. And the resulting blood sure looked suspiciously like red paint, but there was a lot of it and it was vibrant and kinda glorious, so I wasn't complaining. The campy gore is probably what Hitchcock would have called a "Mcguffin", something a story doesn't really need but nevertheless simply can't do without. Anyone unwary enough to allow such a lumbering tank of a woman to get the better of them surely deserved to croak! I found the sordid spectacle of her and of the movie to be very amusing and enjoyable. Most of the time I was baffled by the bizarre feel, but throughout it all the stern, strangely lovable gloomy presence of Ethel was there to ease the pain! And although it was no surprise to me as I had earlier reached the conclusion that the picture would get to that point sooner or later, the abrupt quick-shot way it ends gives it an extra preposterous kick that actually caps things off really well and it ended with another great laugh for me. If you ask me this isn't anything remotely special and isn't good or well made enough for it to qualify as a horror classic, but for a terrible quality effort that's cut-down to size, "Crazy Fat Ethel" gives a fair amount of fun to ensure it becomes a surreal slasher nightmare that just about does the trick! She's really fat.
Review of Criminally Insane
