1964, USA
One of the essential hagsploitation films that followed in the wake of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, Strait-Jacket was the first of two features written for exploiteer William Castle by Psycho scribe Robert Bloch (the other being the ‘paranoid woman’ film The Night Walker of the same year).
Sentenced to 20 years in an asylum for the axe-murder of her husband (an uncredited Lee Majors, in his screen debut) and his mistress, Lucy Harbin (Joan Crawford, in a hilariously overwrought performance) returns home to her brother’s farm after her release and tries to repair her relationship with her daughter Carol (Diane Baker of Marnie), who was a witness to the murder.
But the tough, confident woman who went into the asylum is not the same woman that comes out, and people tiptoe around her, afraid of the things that might set her off – photographs, gleaming knives, children’s songs, visions of decapitated heads.
When the creepy farmhand (George Kennedy) offers her an axe to let her slaughter a chicken she nearly has a nervous breakdown.
This reticent, shamed woman is inexplicably transformed into a drunken flirt when Carol’s fiancé stops by for a drink – possibly buying into her daughter’s dream to have everything ‘just as it was’ 20 years ago – and is snapped out of it only by a surprise visit from her doctor, who feels she’s become unbalanced again and threatens to take her back to the asylum.
When bodies start piling up, all evidence suggests that Lucy’s murderous impulses have returned.
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