Hush (1998)

This soapy Southern family melodrama has been shamelessly, laughably packaged up as a psychosexual thriller with a sinister title, 'Husssssh' (say it with real menace) and a negative imperative byline on the poster, 'Don't breathe a word' suggesting life-or-death secrets that never eventuate, but what you actually get is Gwyneth Paltrow in a Worzel Gummidge wig appearing as Helen, a New York newlywed who insists on running around Kilronan, her husband's horse ranch, naked and having sex where of course her mother-in-law will encounter her, so really it shouldn't surprise her when the mother-in-law, whom we know to be a rank nutter on account of her collection of wind-up carousel music boxes, starts to engineer Helen's marriage and pregnancy.

★☆☆☆☆

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Hush (2016)

Mia Farrow and Audrey Hepburn have both played blind women terrorised in their homes (in See No Evil and Wait Until Dark, respectively) but Hush's heroine-in-distress, Maddie, is mute and deaf...and she's a writer, and this rather hilariously means when a crossbow-wielding psychopath appears at the window of her remote cottage-in-the-woods and tells her he is going to pace about outside until the end of the movie - or until something happens, whichever comes first - she can play out in her author's mind all the possible outcomes of this scenario just like she would were she plotting one of her own novels, and it is funny how deliberately this plot device is set-up, prefaced as it is with pointed conversations at the film's outset and during an extended sequence mid-film, given Maddie only realises with this far-too-great fanfare what anyone in the audience knows very well from watching other iterations of the tired, distasteful "deafblind or mute woman-in-a-home-invasion film" (or, let's face it, any psycho slasher film ever): that she'll have to kill or be killed.

★★☆☆☆

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Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)

As a kid I sat up into the early hours secretly watching this grisly 1960s southern gothic horror and the story of traumatised Charlotte with her Lizzie Borden-style childhood gave me the worst nightmares a movie has ever given me! 

★★★★☆

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