 Today's edition of Frightfully Forgotten, but first of all, what are we drinking today? Sir Alexander Saxton's Fossil. It's a German ice-box. You have to freeze it. It's a fossil! Today we're going to be talking about 1976's Burnt Offerings, and this episode is actually a request episode. We were requested to do a review on this movie, so here we go. Directed by Dan Curtis. He also did Dracula with Jack Palin's. Dracula and Coat Dracula. Another one to mention amongst a lot of others, he did Trilogy of Terror. Karen Black is in this, and she's in that Trilogy of Terror. The old woman in the House of a Thousand Corpses. Oliver Reed is in this, and he was in The Brood, which we had covered for the Canadian Top 10 movies. And Gladiator, just to mention two from a huge list of all of what he has done. Betty Davis is in this, and Burgess Meredith. Burnt Offerings starts off with the Rolf family, and they are looking for a house to rent during the summer. They go visit this nice huge, big mansion out in the country. First open the door, there's this weird caretaker, there's all toothless and everything. Keep everything spick and fan! Owned by a family. You really only see the brother and the sister. They're both very, very strange. Burgess Meredith, he plays the brother, and he's like an invalid, he's in a wheelchair looking out the window, watching their little boy play while the parents look at the house and the boy all hurts himself. Yeah, I mean... Lovely boy, lovely boy. But there's one caveat if they want to rent this place. The brother and sister leave during the summer, and mom wants to stay. You'll never see her, you'll never hear her peep. She's very, very reclusive, bringing her three meals a day, and that's it. They were told, you know, don't worry about the house, the house takes care of itself. And you can tell that Oliver Reed is kind of hesitant, but Marion talks him into it. They are bringing Ben's aunt with them, which is played by Betty Davis. Get there, and the place is kind of almost worse for wear. It almost looks worse than the condition that they saw it last. Open up the fridge, and it's loaded with food and champagne, and they go to go turn on a light and the pantry, and it doesn't work. Oliver Reed goes to go open up a bottle of champagne and cuts himself. Soon as there's a bit of bloodshed, that pantry light turns on. I think I see Ding Dongs! Marion has to go up and kind of, you know, introduce herself to the old woman. It doesn't hear any response back through the door. One day Ben and Davey are playing in the pool, throwing the kid up, and the kid goes back in the water and gets kind of more vicious, and then suddenly he's like picking the kid up and like slamming him in the water, and beholding him there, like, slamming the headlock! Kidding the headlock, like drowning this poor kid until the kid hits his dad and bluddle over the place and retreats on him. The dad also starts having all these weird dreams of like his mother's funeral. Guy driving the hearse and he pulls up and he's always has sunglasses on and looks at him and smiles, and there's a scene with a gas heater that's been left on. The boy's trying to sleep. All the windows are closed and everything, and the door's locked. The supertrize is forcing it open. Super hard! Yeah, I think all of them are doing some Method Act in there. They probably had a sore shoulder for a good week. Also, the aunt starts to actually get sick too. Marion's been sort of becoming more and more of a recluse. She won't give Ben any attention anymore if you know what I mean. They're all on the lawn. Come on, Marion. Jesus. The poor aunt ends up succumbing to whatever illness that she had. Marion won't even come to the funeral. Ben is pretty pissed off when he gets back too. He's starting to see like siding from the house starting to almost melt away. It's starting to come off and there's new siding that's coming underneath. The shingles are like washing away and new shingles are appearing underneath. The clocks weren't working when they showed up and suddenly they started ticking. He tries to get the family out of the house, but Marion won't go. So he just takes Davy in the station wagon, the 70s station wagon. All these trees start falling. He just keeps driving into these trees too. To the point where he actually hits the steering wheel and he's all bleeding. Marion comes up to the side of the car after and drives them back. And that's where we're going to end it. So if you want to find out what happens at the end of Burnt Offerings, keep watching the movie. And it is one hell of an ending, let me tell you. The movie was based on a novel by Robert Morasco. Heaven read it. No, me either. One thing about this movie that made detour some people is the pacing pretty slow. But really keep you intrigued and really keep you wondering. And you're like, okay, well I have to keep watching this because I want to know what's happening with this house and with Marion and the old woman upstairs. Supposedly she's there, but you never hear or see her. It doesn't spell anything out for you this movie. You do have to watch and pay attention. That in itself is the payoff, right? I mean, you've invested yourself in this movie and these characters, right? The payoff can in some ways be what you make it. Speaking of the characters, that is what really makes this movie shine. And what makes it work is not only the characters, and the relationship between the characters is actually very interesting, very dynamic. And that's whole part of the slow burn is you take time to build the relationships and while the actors having to pull it off, it's all about them. Because there's no real effects in this movie. You don't see any ghosts. It's all based on the performance of four actors, really. Yeah, exactly. And without that performance being spot on and nailing it, well, the movie would completely fail. Yeah, you wouldn't believe it. In this movie, the parenting role reversed. The dad is actually the mom in this movie. Yeah, he's the nurturing, caring. He takes care of the kid and the mother. She's the absent one. So it's interesting. It's an interesting take on that. And the neat thing about this movie too is all the lines are blurred. It's not really definitive or there's ghosts in that house and they're doing it. And the reclusive mother, what role does she play in it all? Was she even ever physically up in that room? You don't know. You don't know. You see the light on, kind of like the Bates house. But on set, it wasn't all hunky-dory. Betty Davis apparently didn't get along with everybody on set. Karen Black didn't show her enough respect and take the role as serious as she should. She didn't like the fact that all of her read would be basically drunk all the time. His drunken escapades on set? He liked to fucking drink. He was a notorious boozer and partier. He actually ended up dying while filming of Gladiator in 1999 in a drinking contest with a bunch of sailors. It's like something out of a movie. Who does that in real life? That's something you just hear about. I guess all of her read does. He had eight pints of lager, 12 double rums. So that's 24 shots of rum. That's a whole bottle basically. And half a bottle of whiskey. Yeah, in his system before he ended up having a heart attack and dying. It was just insane. On that note, if you haven't seen Burnt Offerings, you're a fan of like changeling I think for sure. Amityville Horror. And even a movie that we're going to be covering very shortly, The Haunting. Haunting, yeah. Definitely check out Burnt Offerings. It's a great slow burn, 70s suspense thriller with one hell of a fucking payoff. Oh yeah, you definitely get the reward at the end. As all of her read would have probably said, keep drinking.