What Became of Jack and Jill? (1972)

A stupid druggy and his dumb drugged-up girlfriend wants to kill his grandmother for her house and money. They are irritating as they can be. It's really easy to feel bad for the grandmother who's seemingly stuck with her awful and evil grandson caring for her. It's one of those films concerning youthism, power to the youth and down with the "oldies" (as said in the film).The movie had a couple of moments of being a little bit interesting but kept falling flat after the "moments" each time. It's slow, boring mainly and the two youths are irritating as all hell. Let's just say I was unimpressed with the film for the most part.2/10

Amicus, who had a strong run of anthology horror films by this time (and would continue to have more throughout the ensuing decade) released this film two years after its completion. Its minimalist approach was difficult to market and it sank without much fanfare, and is now extremely rare. It concerns the machinations of Johnnie and Jill, indulging in some bizarre 'young versus old' theatrics (with imagery of teens dressed as Nazi soldiers, gunning down a truckload of pensioners, who are herded like cattle) to frighten Johnnie's rich Gran to death.Vanessa Howard plays Jill with all the hallmarks of a 1970's wrong 'un. Chewing gum, slightly cockney, indulges in casual sex – definitely bad news. Howard plays her convincingly. A dark dreamer, she wants a better life than the one which currently traps her. And it does trap her. Her boss casually gropes her as a matter of course, and the locations where she lives are dank and littered with grim perpetual winter's drizzle.Jack is played by Paul Nicholas, who went on to become a successful pop singer – one of his biggest hits was called 'Grandma's Party'. He doesn't want to work ('9-5? Who needs a bloody job?' he asks himself) and provides a comparative voice of reason between them both.Gran, Alice Talent, is played by Mona Washbourne who refuses to portray her as the sweet, docile old girl this film seems to cry out for. Instead, she is more real, grounded, and not afraid to tell Jack a few home truths now and again. But when she breaks down and declares, "You'd think it was a crime to be old. We can't help it," whilst facing the brunt of Jack's continued lapses into passive aggression, your heart breaks for her.Like 'Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1971)', the star of this particular show is Vanessa Howard, who is ice cold throughout but still has some wonderful lines (her departing words to her former employer: "Book yourself a nice cruise, right up your own back passage!"). All performances are terrific, especially when the two youngsters are written as such wholly unlikeable characters.The story is slow and mostly uneventful, enlivened by the characters and their mounting arguments when their carefully laid plans come to nothing in their drizzly lives of 70's drudgery. The film certainly doesn't deserve it's mostly forgotten status. Whilst hardly a straightforward horror, the concepts are certainly brutal and the slight humour that embraces them is dark indeed.

If you are checking out this title here on IMDb, chances are you are a fan of Amicus productions and are searching for the very few titles that haven't made their way to DVD yet. I managed to get my hands on a copy of this one and watched it last night.A 20-something loser who lives with his grandmother schemes to get rid of her so he can inherit the house and the big pile of money she's sitting on. With the help of his cold-as-ice girlfriend, he convinces poor Granny that a rising group of British youth are violently getting rid of all old people, making her last days as torturous as possible. That is basically the plot. There is no supernatural twist as I was expecting from an Amicus production. While the film does manage to generate sympathy for Granny, it doesn't do much else.We've all seen this type of story play out many, many times before - Amicus themselves did a much better version in one of the stories in "Tales From The Crypt" with Peter Cushing, but with the plot-enhancing supernatural twist. Don't go out of your way to find this one guys, there is a reason why this is one hasn't been re-released yet.

This is an obscure English thriller, whose interrogative, nursery rhymesque title suggests an attempt to connect it to the series of bigger-budgeted "crazy old lady" thrillers directed by Robert Aldrich and Curtis Harrington ("Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?", "Who Slew Auntie Roo?", etc.). The old lady here though (played by Mona Washburn) is genuinely sweet, and the villains are her lazy, amoral grandson and his sexy Lady Macbeth-in-training girlfriend (Vanessa Howard). The two young people plot to get their hands on grannie's money, but rather than simply pushing her down the stairs they hatch an elaborate plot to convince her that radical youth have taken over England are planning to do away with "oldies" like her. This is thus kind of like a nasty horror version of the recent film "Goodbye, Lenin", but not played for (intentional) laughs.This is an entertaining movie while Washburn is in it, but the other two characters are so disagreeable that it's hard to care much about them after she exits, and the young couple are also too one-dimensional to really relish them getting their eventual just desserts either. This isn't really the fault of the actors though. Vanessa "Girly" Howard is especially good(even if her failure to take off her clothes is pretty regrettable).This movie was also probably a little too tame for 1972, even for the famously violence-adverse British, and this too might have led to it's failure and current obscurity. Still it isn't a bad movie, and deserves at least a minor footnote in the history of the British psycho thriller.