In short: The Granny (1995)

An intensely horrible old woman we will only ever call Granny (Stella Stevens who really brings life to her horrid character) lives in her creaky old mansion, and is cared for by her apparently saintly (yet born out of wedlock – gasp!) granddaughter Kelly (Shannon Whirry).

The rest of Granny’s intensely hateable family pops in for a supposed (hateful) family visit, but in actuality, they are there to poison the old bat so they can finally grab their inheritance. As it happens, the poisoning plan proceeds with difficulty yet ends with a dead Granny. However, before her death, some random guy pops in to give Granny a potion of immortality, because she secretly gave a lot of money to charity and must therefore be secretly good instead of a hateful old bat and deserves to live forever. The immortality elixir comes with rules, very much like a Gizmo, but Granny does of course neither meditate on her universal love (fat chance) nor keep the elixir out of the sunlight as she is asked, so after her death, she comes back to life as an even more demonic version of herself to murder her family and try to make Kelly her successor.

Luca “Ghoulies” Bercovici’s The Granny is a lot like an overlong episode of “Tales from the Crypt”, just without the Hollywood stars, the great director behind the camera, and minus economical storytelling. I’m okay with the whole nonsensical immortality elixir business, but the script suffers rather badly under a need to reiterate how comically horrible everyone on screen is again and again to fill the running time. Once, these slimy molluscs pretending to be people are fun to watch, twice, they are still a bit funny, but once the film gets around to make the fifth variation on the same three jokes, it does begin to strain the patience. I do genuinely like the random weirdness it sometimes gets up to, like everyone in the film (except the bringer of the elixir) pretending softcore specialist Whirry is ugly as hell, or the sequence where one of the women is murdered by the revived sad little animal heads the most perverse of the fur lovers like to keep on the dead animals they wear.


In fact, the final act is generally goofy and absurd but really rather fun in its cheap nonsense horror way, it’s just not all that easy to slog through the mire of repeated jokes (perhaps even The Mire of Repeated Jokes) in the middle.