78: What’s The Matter With Helen?

We're wrapping up our Pride 2025 series with a case study in camp. We're looking at Curtis Harrington's 1971 American gothic melodrama, What's The Matter With Helen starring Debbie Reynolds and Shelly Winters.

Two mothers settle in Hollywood, trying to escape their reputations as the mothers of two nationally infamous murderers. It's all fragile emotional states and overacting as one mom marries up out of her station and the other goes quite insane.

The first in Harrington's high-camp era, followed by movies like Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? and The Killing Kind, Harrington's career would come to be defined by a series of high-camp misadventures that were squarely in the wheelhouse of gay moviegoers the world around and continue to be major influences on the wild, overwrought melodramas that came in its wake.

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