I Want To Live! (1958)
This is a good if harrowing tale which is based on a true story. Barbara (an Oscar winning Susan Hayward) is a forger, floozy and hooker. She has a useless husband and a newborn son. A woman is murdered and Barbara is blamed. Cure pure melodrama as Barbara asserts her innocence but a trial, press abuse and the gas chamber await. This was searing account of the justice system.
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Deadly Spa aka Zephyr Springs (2013)
A resort turns into a cult nightmare in this preposterous hogwash. A frazzled single mother and her snotty daughter go to a spa which is run by people who think they have oracular import. The heroines are dumb, selfish and ambivalent. This was not a searing portrait of a cult. ‘Invitation To Hell’ was better. The bratty daughter impugns the cultists motives, mom likes the self-perpetuating elite, there are forced beatific smiles and I found no merit at all in this. Controlling menacing cultists who are being weird act in unwieldy ways. The daughter is caustically annoying. People oddly aren’t held accountable. There is screaming, bad acting, murder, people going all Katniss and insta-brainwashing which wears off cos the script says so.
Best Line:
“He wants to own you.”