It’s 1987. You are confronted with a VHS tape of a movie called Crazy Fat Ethel (AKA Criminally Insane). With a title like that, a $3 price tag and a blurb that reads “300 pounds of maniacal fury!”—well, what do you do?

I’ll bet many of you would have done the same thing I did, buy it. But if you think is this the part where I tell you what an amazing, overlooked cinematic gem Crazy Fat Ethel is, you would be mistaken. It’s a pretty terrible film, although if you’re a fan of really, really bad movies it does have a few things to recommend it in an “Ed Wood” kind of way, i.e. cinematic ineptitude, bad writing and over the top performances. It compares to a particularly bloody Troma release.

DVD Drive-In had this to say about Crazy Fat Ethel:

Ethel Janowski, a 300-pound mental patient, is released to the care of her uptight grandmother, who lives in a vintage townhouse in San Francisco (yep, lots of great location footage in this one). Ethel bitches about the meager meals she was given at the asylum (“two softboiled eggs and dry toast for breakfast!”) and devours mammoth meals whenever she feels like it, at all hours of the day. When Granny locks all the food in the house in the pantry and hides the key, Ethel grabs a butcher knife and stabs it through her chest, then keeps stabbing the corpse’s hand to steal the key away! Immediately after she stabs a delivery boy to death with a broken bottle (“I don’t have $80! I’ve only got $4.50!”), her prostitute sister Rosalee arrives to stay for a while. In-between making out and snorting cocaine with her sleazy make-up wearing boyfriend John and turning tricks with desperate immigrants in the house, Rosalee begins to smell the rotting corpses Ethel has hid inside Granny’s room… It’s not long before Ethel has to use her trusty meat cleaver to ensure that no one discovers her secret!

The actress playing CFE,  Priscilla Alden, eats so much food in this movie (pounds and pounds of bacon, entire cartons of eggs) that her prodigious gluttony almost makes CFE a profound, one-woman metaphor for late-stage Capitalism and the American way of life (although I seriously doubt that this is what the director had in mind, I hasten to add). Her performance is the best thing about the film. (Attention perverts: There are numerous long takes of her staring blankly into space eating massive bowls of ice cream, if you’re into that kinda thing…)

Crazy Fat Ethel was shot in 1973, but not released until 1975. Believe it or not, they actually made a sequel, Crazy Fat Ethel II (or Criminally Insane 2, if you prefer) in the late 1980s. The same crew, again with Alden, also made a related film called Death Nurse. Apparently someone intends to do a remake?
 

 

Watch Crazy Fat Ethel after the jump…