Die Sister, Die! is a quiet (except for a couple of nutty dream sequences), character-based, psychological horror/thriller that may disappoint you if you need the walls to be painted red, but the strong performances, aesthetically pleasing locations, relaxed pace, and complex and morally ambiguous characters really worked for me. I had a good time with this one.
For such a straightforward little movie with a small cast,
Die Sister, Die! had a difficult, drawn-out production. Filming began in 1972, but financial difficulties and the cancer diagnosis of director Randall Hood slowed things down. More filming took place in the mid-'70s (the cars in the movie are mostly '75 and '76 models), but Hood died, aged 48, in 1976 before any post-production work could be done. One of the film's three leads, Jack Ging, made it his mission to turn the unedited footage into a finished product, and the movie was finally completed and released in 1978. Clint Eastwood, a friend of Ging's, is rumored to have helped with the film's completion, but that rumor has been neither confirmed nor denied. Despite the production troubles and Hood's health problems, the movie is consistent in tone and performance and doesn't look like a stop/start affair.
The movie opens with the wealthy Amanda Price (Edith Atwater) attempting suicide in her very distinctive-looking home (the Piru Mansion, more on that location later). Her doctor, Thorne (Kent Smith, Atwater's real-life husband), and her brother, Edward (Jack Ging), save her, which inspires only hatred from Amanda toward Edward. The doctor tries to get to the bottom of the siblings' enmity and the reasons for Amanda's multiple suicide attempts from an evasive Edward but fails. Dr. Thorne also fails to convince Edward to have his suicidal sister institutionalized, but Edward is open to the idea of paying for a live-in nurse.
A cocky Edward stops by a dive bar called Hank's to enlist the services of former nurse-turned-waitress Esther Harper (Antoinette Bower). Esther was a live-in nurse for an elderly millionaire whose family neglected him. Angry at his family and appreciative of Esther's help, the rich old man married Esther so she'd inherit his dough, but the family successfully stopped the will in court after the old man's death. The bad publicity forced Esther out of the nursing profession. Edward lets her know he knows all about her past and offers her the chance to make some big bucks. She's reluctant, but he leaves his card.
Esther shows up a few days later at Edward's office to get more information about the job. He gives it to her straight. He'll pay Esther a standard nurse's salary to look after Amanda and report back to him about whatever his sister tells her. There are some embarrassing family secrets he doesn't want the outside world to learn, you see. He then drops the bomb, though Esther already knows the score and is not surprised at what she's hearing. Edward tells her not to intervene when, not if, his sister attempts suicide again. Don't help her, don't save her, let her die. Once his sister is dead, Esther will get a $25,000 payment. She accepts the job.
Esther gets more of the family dirt from Amanda and the housekeeper, Mrs. Gonzalez (Rita Conde), once inside the mansion. The late Price patriarch, James Lendon (played in flashbacks and dream sequences by Robert Emhardt), still staring haughtily and imposingly down at his family from a huge portrait on the wall, doted on spoiled youngest sibling Nell (Peg Shirley) and despised his other two children, Amanda and Edward, who despised James and Nell right back. After the old man's death from a heart attack, Nell disappeared to Europe, never to be seen again. She even skipped the funeral. Not suspicious at all. Amanda inherited the mansion and gained control of the dispersal of funds, putting her brother Edward on a healthy but fixed income so he wouldn't blow the entire fortune. With Nell out of the picture, Amanda and Edward decided to despise each other, too, and Amanda became a depressive recluse, barely leaving the mansion.
This is where we're at when Esther meets Amanda. The two women don't trust each other, but a slowly growing oddball mutual admiration society eventually develops. Is Esther really going to help Edward let Amanda die, or is she going to form an alliance with Amanda? Maybe she'll double-cross both of them? What is Edward's real goal, and does he plan to do more than wait for Amanda to kill herself? Will he kill Esther, too? What really happened to Nell and James? We in the audience and pretty much every other character already know that Edward is a greedy and conniving guy who wants his sister dead, but we don't know what else he's up to, and Esther's and Amanda's motivations are also murky and unknowable. None of the characters trust each other, all of them have secrets, and the audience is never sure of anyone's motives or plans, other than Edward's obvious ones. I love these kinds of stories, and the cast members, made up of veteran actors with much theater, episodic television, and character actor and day player film experience, deliver naturalistic, understated performances that kept me invested.
The location shooting also contributes to the movie's flavor. The dive bar, Edward's office, a nearby Catholic church, a late-night diner, all these places are complementary to the film's tone, but the mansion itself is the star of the show. The Piru Mansion (also called the Newhall Mansion and the Cook Mansion) is a Queen Anne-style Victorian mansion in the small town of Piru, California, about 48 miles from downtown Los Angeles. The crazily distinctive home, built in 1886 by a wealthy fundamentalist Christian businessman from Illinois attempting to create a second Garden of Eden, sold to two more wealthy families over the ensuing years, entirely rebuilt in 1982-3 after a devastating 1981 fire, and currently owned by a private investment company that rents it out for events, corporate retreats, and vacations, pops up frequently in movies and TV shows. Before
Die Sister, Die!, my most recent sighting of the mansion was in the absolutely bonkers 1973 drive-in exploitation movie
Pets, and it's also appeared in
Desert Fury,
Don't Be Afraid of the Dark,
Terror at Red Wolf Inn, and episodes of
Charlie's Angels,
Mannix,
Fantasy Island,
Hart to Hart,
The Incredible Hulk,
Highway to Heaven,
Murder, She Wrote,
Melrose Place,
The X-Files, and
Monk. A new Garden of Eden, indeed.
The hardcore horror nerds may not be wild about
Die Sister, Die!, but I truly enjoyed its performances, '70s locations, morally dubious characters, and low-key charm. It's somewhere between a
Columbo episode and a
Tales from the Crypt morality play of comeuppance, and I like hanging out in that space.
