TOP 25 CAMP FILMS OF ALL TIME - 22

WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH HELEN?



What the fuck is the matter with Helen? That's the question on my lips and everyone else who has seen this movie. It starts with a 30s newsreel about Eisenhower and the next flash we see 2 young men being led away after a brutal killing. Their mother's berated and screamed at by the baying public. Suddenly we enter the movie proper and try to find out what exactly is the matter with Helen.

Helen and Adelle are the mother's of the murderous men who quickly bond (murder does that apparently) and decide to set up a new life for themselves on the other side of America and head for California to forget all about their troubled and now chequered past. Adelle is a nifty dance teacher and Helen plays piano so they open a dance school with budding young children tapping away hopefully heading for Hollywood if their pushy mothers have anything to do with it.

Helen and Adelle start getting crank calls, Helen gets loopier having visions of her husband being killed in a ploughing accident years before, she turns to God and Sister Alma - an evangelist. Adelle meanwhile is thinking purely of men and is chased around town by a handsome widower, Helen and Adelle argue but then Helen pushes a man downstairs who she thinks is after them but it turns out he works for a company locating missing heirs as Helen was due an inheritance. This sends Helen completely round the bend, Adelle tries to comfort her but she's completely wasted - she chops up her pet rabbits and then takes to Adelle with a carving knife. She then gets a visit from a police inspector who says that the man who Helen had killed was actually stalking them for the death of their son's victim so Helen's paranoia and niftiness with sharp objects was totally unneeded. Then, Adelle's beau turns up to see Helen playing maniacly on the piano, Adelle trussed up in her tap dancing uniform on the makeshift stage dead as a dodo and that is really Helen in a nutshell.

Sorry for spoling the plot but it's obvious from the posters what happens. This was at the very tail end of the Grand guignol cycle of films that started in 1962 with Baby Jane. Shelley Winters getting fatter by the movie plays Helen and Debbie Reynolds is the glamourpuss Adelle. Throw in a camp elocution coach and good old Agnes Moorehead as Sister Alma and it just gets that little bit more mental. There are some really strange scenes, Adelle's pupils see a dwarf lady walking down the street and a big deal is made of it, it's almost as if the scene doesn't belong in the movie. There are lengthy tap dancing scenes with Debbie Reynolds flirting with a widower in one, believe it or believe it not. Then Helen and Sister Alma cross words when Helen feels that Alma isn't saving her. Agnes Moorehead seems to change face completely from each picture - she was scrawny in Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, regal in this, daffy in Bewitched and just old in Dear Dead Delilah - I swear she must have had plastic surgery for years during the 60s to cope with all these different appearances.

TRIVIA

- Debbie Reynolds wasn't first choice for the part of Adelle. Producerd wanted Rita Hayworth but she was starting to feel the effects of Alzheimers so had to pass, Shirley McLain also gave it a miss hence Debbie Reynolds was approached.

- Henry Farrell who wrote the screenplay for Whatever Happened to Baby Jane also scribed "Helen"

- Shelley and Debbie didn't get on too well. Debbie was the movie star and Shelley was the method actress. Shelley was getting heavier and imagined a rivalry between the two apparently.

- The rabbits that are shown to be slain in the movie were real rabbits who were put to sleep by the ASPCA.

- Agnes Moorehead's scene was written the morning she filmed. She was unhappy but came out of her trailer word perfect for filming.

- The director wanted Sir Ralph Richardson for the part of Hamilton Starr, the camp elocution teacher. He didn't get him but on his next film, "Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?" Richardson was cast alongside Shelley Winters.

- "Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?" is sometimes tagged as a double feature at movies and dvd's with "Helen" Both directed by Curtis Harrington and both starring Shelley Winters. Roo also has Mark Lester playing another orphan (he was Oliver in the 1968 musical Oliver!) who alongside his sister go to a Xmas party at Roo's house in the English countryside. It's a take on Hansel & Gretel as Roo decides to take a fancy to the sister whom she imagines to be her dead daughter that she's kept mummified in the nursery for years after she fell sliding down the bannisters!