Cape Fear (1962)

Dischordant Psycho strings and jazz piano help ratchet up the tension in this twisted 1962 suspense thriller which has Robert 'Night of the Hunter' Mitchum playing Max Cady, a hideous paedophile and psychopathic stalker, fresh out of jail and hellbent on vengeance against the lawyer, Sam Bowden (Gregory Peck) who helped put him away, and of course where else would you flee with your terrified wife and daughter in such circumstances but to your houseboat on Lake Psychopathic Rapist, oops I mean, Cape Fear.

★★★★☆

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What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962)

The first of a series of three What Ever Happened...? horror-thrillers and the movie credited with giving rise to the dreadfully termed 'hagsploitation genre', this piece of grotesquery, like a Southern Gothic Sunset Boulevard with Hammer Film aesthetics, features Bette Davis and Joan Crawford as elderly sisters, one of whom (Baby Jane (Davis)) keeps the other (a wheelchair-bound Blanche (Crawford)) locked in an upstairs room while she plots doing away with her entirely, and the whole thing is like an exercise in bad taste.

★★★☆☆

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