Die! Die! My Darling!

Never have I seen a better example in cinema of how a score can make or break a movie. Because Die! Die! My Darling!, without the score, has a compelling hook to it. A woman wants to make peace with the grieving mother of her deceased fiance before moving on with her new husband-to-be, only to discover said mother is a religious extremist and a total lunatic. The mother takes her hostage and tries to get her to repent before intending to "reunite" the two. Tallulah Bankhead plays the psycho older woman, lashing out at Stefanie Powers' modern young woman, in a clash of generations, ideals, beliefs, and tolerances; Bankhead is excellent as a scenery-chewing nut, and Powers has a lot of feisty energy as the damsel in distress that refuses to succumb to her captor's demands. DDMD is a Hammer production, which is its own vibe. If you've seen a Hammer movie, you get it; exploitative but not trashy, campy but not winking at you the entire time, pushing the envelope but not in an immature way. I can't recall seeing any Hammer pictures set in contemporary times before this, and yet there's still that signature Hammer aesthetic. The gothic horror of Dracula and the folk horror of Twins of Evil are given a modern twist here, with a rustic rural setting that still carries the creepy airs of dimly lit castles and thatched roof cottages from their other movies. But DDMD was clearly made in a post-Psycho world. It is unafraid to go where Psycho went and past it, from Powers proudly admitting she isn't a virgin to the role reversal of mother and son from Psycho but heaping even more uncomfortable undertones on the relationship. DDMD should be an excellent movie. Except there's that damned score, which obliterates the tone the movie is going for at every, and I do mean every, opportunity. When it isn't the weirdest, most upbeat noodling on a harpsichord, its the kind of light, whimsical, breezy bop you'd expect in an episode of The Brady Bunch. It's like the composer was given a description of the movie that made it sound like high camp, and the director was told to play it deadly serious, and nobody knew until the editor had to combine them. The result is a movie that is constantly at odds with itself; there isn't a shred of dark humor or irony to be found in the acting or the script, and there isn't a single note of ominous portent or danger in the score. This combative relationship between the visual and the audio undercuts every moment of DDMD's run time. It was impossible for to appreciate the movie as much as I wanted to when it was being betrayed by its music. Maybe that's overly harsh of me, but it's just how it played out for me.