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hyped garbage

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

I watched this realizing it was a "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" knock-off, and that it might offer some campy thrills. It does, but not to the extent that I expected it would, and somehow the whole thing just falls kinda flat. Shelley Winters and Debbie Reynolds are excellent, and the characters are well-realized and interesting. But the film is surprisingly slow: long stretches of dance recitals and plodding dating scenes between Debbie and Dennis Weaver interrupt the building tension far too often, and one could claim that not much happens for the first 50 minutes or so. It feels like a ballsy horror concept that was ultimately neutered, which has some basis in reality: apparently NBC forced the violence to be toned down so that it could eventually air on television. It doesn't approach the greatness of Baby Jane, but fans of the actresses or aficionados of the sub-genre will find it interesting.

I saw this in the theater way back when and liked it. A lowish-budget thriller, it combines the talents of Shelley Winters and Debbie Reynolds and puts forth yet another story in the genre of older ladies' horror shows. The film is made in color and has some interesting numbers as the two ladies run a school for Shirley Temple wannabees in the 1930s. Agnes Moorehead is on hand as a radio evangelist who Shelly listens to. The ladies run the whole show here, and their fans are not let down. The script is fairly engrossing and the production design is very good. I can't imagine any fan of the two leading ladies not enjoying this. The credits list this as a Filmways production. That's right. The company which gave you Mister Ed and The Beverly Hillbillies now bring you Shelly Winters as a maniacal latent lesbian!

Curtis Harrington's "What's the Matter with Helen?" probably looks corny today. Even so, I derived that overall it deals with moral gray areas. Helen comes across as insane according to the clinical definition, but Adelle is insane in another sense: she's hellbent on fame and prestige at any cost. Large numbers of people moved to Hollywood in the hope of making it big but most likely saw their hopes dashed, as seen in "The Day of the Locust". One might call this movie a dark spin on "TDotL".Aside from all that, it was interesting seeing Debbie Reynolds in this sort of movie. I'm used to seeing her in wholesome roles (or knowing her as the mother of a certain actress who played a certain princess in a galaxy far, far away). True, her character is the perky one in contrast to Shelley Winters's disturbed one, but when was the last time that you saw Debbie Reynolds in a movie dealing with murder? Agnes Moorehead's character is also a shocker. I'm used to seeing her as Endora on "Bewitched", but here she's an evangelist (although her character IS kind of a witch). Goody goody indeed.In the end, the movie has sort of a silly feeling, but it's a very enjoyable movie. You might take some time to see it.So yes, DID you ever see a dream walking or hear it talking? PS, I recently got to meet Peggy Walton-Walker by pure chance. She told me that she appeared in an uncredited role in the scene with Agnes Moorehead. She also co-starred in "Pumpkinhead".

DEBBIE REYNOLDS and SHELLEY WINTERS try to escape their sordid past (their sons were convicted of a brutal killing), so they flee to Hollywood in the 1930s and open a talent school for kiddies who want to become the next Shirley Temple.It's a fun idea for a black comedy, and director Curtis Harrington makes the most of a story by Henry Farrell that pretty much adapts some of the same material he used in other thrillers written exclusively to give aging divas the chance to do some melodramatic emoting. While this doesn't reach the heights (or depths) of BABY JANE or CHARLOTTE, it does provide a lot of camp fun for film addicts familiar with the '30s scene.DENNIS WEAVER has the only interesting male role, but the film belongs to Debbie (she sings and dances, too) and Shelley (who has a madcap time going insane) and there's even a shocking ending to keep the horror fans happy.If you enjoy this sort of thing, done previously in similar films like WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO AUNT ALICE?, this one is easy to take.