Director/Screenplay – Nick Philips [Nick Millard], Producer – Frances Millard, Photography – Karil Ostman, Art Direction – Charles R. Fenwick. Production Company – I.R.M.I. Films.
Priscilla Alden (Ethel Janowski), Michael Flood (Rosalie Janowski), Jane Lambert (Mrs Janowski), Robert Copple (John), C.L. LeFleur [George ‘Buck’ Flower] (Detective McDonagh), Cliff McDonald (Dr Gerard), Gina Martine (Mrs Kendley), Charles Egan (Drunk Man)
The obese Ethel Janowski is released from the psychiatric institution where she has been undergoing electroshock therapy for her anger issues. She returns to stay at her grandmother’s home in San Francisco. However, at seeing Ethel eating all the time, the grandmother locks the food away. An enraged Ethel stabs her. When the delivery boy refuses to deliver more food until she pays the bill, Ethel kills him too and leaves both bodies in her grandmother’s room. However, Ethel’s sister Rosalie, a prostitute, comes to stay and Ethel has difficulties in keeping the bodies hidden. As others threaten her, they too are killed.
Criminally Insane is one of those films where you are surprised to find it has not been discovered as a cult classic before. You would have thought it absolutely perfect for the psychotronic crowd.
Director Nick Millard had been making nudies and adult films since the early 1960s and Criminally Insane was his first legitimate film. He subsequently went on to make other horror films, most of them under the name of Nick Phillips, including Satan’s Black Wedding (1975), Death Nurse (1987) and its sequel Death Nurse 2 (1988), which also starred Priscilla Alden who plays Ethel here, Cemetery Sisters (1987), Doctor Bloodbath (1987), Dracula in Vegas (1999) and a version of The Turn of the Screw (2003) that remains unseen, along with some action films of the era.
Criminally Insane proves quite eye opening. As we watch 250 pounds plus Priscilla Alden clomping through the house with determined scowl while wielding kitchen knife or meat cleaver, you can tell it is the real thing. It is exactly like Tod Browning and his use of actual human deformities in Freaks (1932) where Nick Phillips/Millard has cast Alden for her obesity and this is a central facet of the character. Alden gives a performance of fierce meanness that imprints itself on the film. The film draws its horrors out of obesity and has an anti-heroine who is driven by her hunger. Given that the latter half of the film deals with Ethel’s problems disposing of bodies, the final freeze shock image only seems a logical next step.
Nick Phillips doesn’t stint when it comes to blood. The only drawback here being that the blood looks far too bright and scarlet red, hence fake. It also kind of takes you aback watching Priscilla Alden and sister Michael Flood tossing about casual racial comments. With its casting the psycho of the show as a plus-size woman, Criminally Insane is such an uncompromisingly un-Politically Correct film that it is hard to imagine anything that comes anywhere near it ever being made today.
Criminally Insane 2 (1987) was a sequel again directed by Nick Millard and featuring return appearance from Priscilla Alden. The film underwent a remake as Crazy Fat Ethel (2016) starring Dixie Gers in the title role.
Following Criminally Insane, Priscilla Alden did go on to a small career subsequently, appearing in several of Nick Millard’s other films, most notedly as the star of the Death Nurse duo. Outside of that, she had minor roles in some A-list films including Birdy (1984), Dying Young (1991) and Nine Months (1995), before her death in 2007.
Trailer here