The Mad Room [HD]

EXCELLENT 60's horror classic with sexy Stella Stevens! Where's the DVD???
THE MAD ROOM stars sexy Stella Stevens and Shelley Winters in a great horror thriller from the late 60's. Shelley is high camp as the rich widow who employs Stella (in an excellent performance) as her secretary. Trouble is Stella's brother and sister need a place to stay and Shelley doesn't know they've just been released from a mental institution for having killed their parents. Or did they? Or which one? Now there's more killing... Great supporting role from Beverly Garland. This film has never been on VHS and should be released on DVD. Who wants to download it? I want it in my collection!!! Come on Columbia Pictures!!!! With all the junk being released on DVD why overlook some of these lost gems?

Don't We All Need To Visit 'The Mad Room' Occasionally?
[THE MAD ROOM - (1968) - Directed by Bernard Girard - Widescreen presentation] In this modernized remake of the far superior 1946 film, 'Ladies In Retirement', Stella Stevens portrays a young woman whose two younger siblings were convicted of murdering their parents years ago (though neither child remembers who did the actual killing) and have been kept in a mental institution since. She's currently the employed companion and secretary to Shelley Winters, an impossible-to-appease widow and overbearing mother to the young man Miss Stevens is engaged to. They are all living in a house still under construction, conditions are chaotic, tempers are easily enraged, and the kids, the eldest now turning eighteen, are getting discharged from the asylum. So Stella has little choice but to bring the children to live at her current residence, omitting their past homicidal history, of course. Their understandably fragile mental conditions will be put to new tests as they go straight from one...

Great fun!
I've finally seen this movie again after years of just having a faint memory of it, so I've now got to decide if it lived up to my memory...well it pretty much does. The story concerns Stella Stevens as Ellen, a young woman who's impending marriage is interrupted by news that her younger brother and sister are being released from an asylum where they were committed after the murder of both their parents. Now considered sane, they are handed over into Ellen's custody, despite her misgivings, and the three of them move into the home of Ellen's fiancée's mother in law, played by Shelley Winters, which in turn gives HER major misgivings. And this being a horror film, it isn't long before there's a new murder...

So what still works is the general sense of unease, mostly generated by great performances by the two younger children, played by Michael Burns and Barbara Sammeth. They portray just the right amount of inscrutability, and keep you guessing as to their actual...

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