Strait-Jacket (1964) (2024)

Popular reviews

• Review by ben empey ★★★½

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  There are like four decapitations in this movie and the most shocking moment is when Joan lights a match on a record while it’s playing

• Review by Dylan ★★★★ 5

  When you sit down to watch this, you expect to be sidetracked, perhaps even gripped, but not undermined. However, the picture subverts you in a number of subtle and strong ways. It's a horror story, but it frequently collides with sporadically humorous camp, leaving it with a stench that lasts longer than the plot's intentions. What begins as a rambunctious story of betrayal, murder, and insanity quickly devolves into a manic cat-and-mouse game of fears, desperation, suspense, and tricks.

  If Joan Crawford had not created such a memorable and dominating persona, this would be nothing. She does an excellent job of conveying the character's sorrow as the years pass and beauty fades. Crawford embodies the ferocious passions of a woman's perilous impulses, stressing authentic pathos while infusing incipient madness along with her comic aura, which brings the film to a pulsating life.

• Review by Christina ★★★★ 4

  lucy harbin took an axe
  gave her husband 40 wacks
  when she saw what she had done
  she gave his girlfriend 41

• Review by nathaxnne [hiatus] ★★★★½ 4

  William Castle was a great and empathetic director of actors. He knew how to manifest truly great performances from them, how to arrange them on their marks, how to film shifts of emotion as they crossed a person's face, how to array these faces in a composition over time. He also knew how to center a star within a scene and within a movie, that all drama is built moment-by-moment, and he proved time and again a more-than-able matchmaker for these necessary elements. No matter how low-budget the surroundings, he knew how to treat those who appeared in his films so that they felt like the stars he knew them to be. Strait-Jacket completely adores Joan Crawford, using her own…

• Review by Kylo ★★★★ 1

  Joan Crawford iconically plays opposite an axe in this punchy psychological drama. That wig was a dramatic choice.

• Review by alanis ㅤ󠀠󠀠󠀠 ★★★★ 2

  i just hate to see anything caged ⋆˙⟡ ♡

  𐙚 i never knew i needed to see joan decapitating someone until i saw how pretty she looked while doing it haha ♡ i’m so in love with her ♡ she was perfect in this film! — this is truly one of her best performances ever.

  this is a very predictable film, but i still found it very entertaining. i feel like the plot twist seems obvious now because so many films have done it, but back then, it must have been really surprising, so i don’t really mind how predictable it is.

  i still loved how they handled the plot twist. — it was original and fun to watch. but i hated the explanation at the end, like the one in psycho. i get why they included those scenes, but i always feel like they think i’m too stupid to get the movie :’)

• Review by laird ★★★½

  Maybe a farm isn't the best place for someone who needs to not think about death or be around axes.

  I love that the dark humor always punched (or chopped I guess) up: cheatin' husbands, judgey doctors, snobby upper crusties. The movie's sympathy is ultimately with the hysterical women!

• Review by Liz ★★★★

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Almost subversive in the way that Crawford brings legitimate pathos and audience sympathy for a character who is most certainly insane. It's pretty obvious from the Castle/Bloch pedigree that there's going to be a twist, I almost kind of wish there wasn't -- I love her character so much that I actually WANTED her to be going around and taking a hatchet to the heads of the bougie parents and evil doctors who won't let her escape her past. That the final reveal and code-mandated ending is so absurd and done with the biggest wink imaginable just shows that I'm not alone in this.

  Really wonder if this was an influence on both Female Trouble (picked up a lot of Dawn Davenport in Joan's performance) and Halloween (the general scenario, the score)?

• Review by The Horror of Marna Larsen ★★★★★ 9

  I kind of want to say that about myself in the third person (Marna Larsen was declared legally insane today.) All solemnly then, cue the big band jukebox number! That would be cool. I was going to do a whole review but I think that's all I've got?

  Schlocktastic!

  Ok now I'm done. I can never not love a William Castle movie. And honestly the 'ok now let's bring the dumb audience up to speed' epilogue in Psycho is every bit as contrived as these are often accused of being.

  60's horror #192

• Review by Jesse ★★★½

  What they did to the Columbia logo 😱

  The king of the “gimmick” b-movie, William Castle, delivers a solid thriller concerning a woman who returns to normal life after being locked in an asylum for the last twenty years. Played brilliantly by Joan Crawford, she shows the sadness and yet tempered enthusiasm for being back with her now mid-20s daughter.But when the bodies pile up, have the ghosts of the past reared their ugly head again?

  Featuring a few sequences that made me yell out “oh my god!” and a third act reveal that is now one of the best shocks I’ve ever seen. Strait-Jacket is definitely under seen but well worth your time. And judging by the reviews, people are seeing it’s subtle brilliance.

• Review by Branson Reese

  "Oh, you and your milk."

  All-time greatest studio logo gag in film history. I haven't seen every movie ever made but I've seen enough.

• Review by {Todd} ★★★½

  "I just hate to see anything caged" -Lucy,

  Hell to the fucking yes to Joan Crawford... more please.

  A murdering mom gets out of an asylum 20 years after killing her husband, she attempts to adjust to normal life again. This is the first of what I imagine will be several so called "hagsploitation" films that I enjoy. With the exception of a minor lull in the second act this film is a non-stop delight filled with murder, mayhem and deceit. Also that chicken scene is cinema, watch this.

  I was genuinely thrilled every time Crawford swung the axe.