Die Sister, Die! (The Companion) (1978)

If you couldn't tell by the number of times I mentioned that Blood Feast DVD during "Schlocktober," I was trying to go through all of the movies in that set so I could get rid of it. However, this item threw a bit of a monkey wrench in my plans because, when I re-watched it while preparing my list of reviews for Schlocktober, I realized that, rather than a horror film, it's more of a mystery/suspense thriller and, therefore, didn't fit the criteria for movies that I review during October. So, I decided to wait until now to do it, not that it's anything worth waiting for, as this is as mediocre and uninvolving a film as you can get without being completely awful. While it's competently made and the acting is fair enough, the story is not interesting in the slightest and it gets pretty boring quite quickly, even if it is only 84 minutes long. (Think of it as a movie Alfred Hitchcock would have made during his most blasé of moods.) And its inclusion in that Blood Feast set is baffling, as it's not gory in the slightest, save for a couple of brief scenes. Then again, the only truly gory movies in that set were The Undertaker and His Pals and Pieces, but still, talk about false advertising. (Speaking of false advertising, that poster is a massive lie and doesn't represent the movie at all.)

Amanda Price, an old spinster woman who lives alone in her family's large Californian house, attempts suicide one night by slashing her wrists, her second such attempt that year. However, she's saved when her brother, Edward, and the family doctor, Thorne, arrive just in time. Amanda is not at all happy about still being alive and clearly has no love for her brother. After seeing to Amanda's wounds and sedating her, Thorne talks with Edward, who suggests hiring a registered nurse to keep an eye on Amanda. While at a bar, Edward meets Esther Harper, a waitress who was once a nurse and who Edward has learned married a 90-year old man she was caring for, only to not receive the money he promised her following his death due to the intervention of the family. Edward offers her the promise of a job, which he says will net her $25,000, and while Esther initially turns him down, she later meets him at his office in town to learn more about it. Edward tells her about Amanda, that her job would be to keep him up on everything that goes on inside the house, as there are certain family secrets he doesn't want exposed, and also tells her that, should Amanda attempt suicide again, she is to let it happen. Despite Amanda's disapproval, Esther moves into the house with her and, even though she's suspicious and shrewish, the two begin to develop something of a bond, as Esther learns of the sad history involving the Price children and their relationship with their late father, James Price. Slowly but surely, Esther begins to learn that the siblings are hiding something, a morbid secret which has a connection to their other sister, Nell, who is supposed to be away. Meanwhile, Edward, wanting their family's fortune, grows tired of waiting for Amanda to commit suicide again and decides to help her along, forcing Esther to go along with him.

Randall Hood was a director who started out in the early 60's as a writer and a producer, writing the story for Final Escape, a 1964 episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (the title Alfred Hitchcock Presents carried during its final three years), and directing The Two Little Bears, a 1961 comedic fantasy, and an obscure, 1965 war film called The Touching and the Not Touching. Before he directed Die Sister, Die!, he did an episode of The Courtship of Eddie's Father and, after this film, he directed a documentary short in 1975 called A Walk in the Forest. Die Sister, Die! ended up being Hood's last film, as he died from cancer in 1976, at the age of 48, while he was in post-production on it. According to the IMDB trivia page, Clint Eastwood is rumored to have been brought in to help finish the film up, as he was friends with actor Jack Ging, who stars in the film.

Speaking of Jack Ging, he plays Edward Price, Amanda Price's brother who, despite seeming concerned for his sister's well-being at the beginning of the movie when he and Dr. Thorne thwart her suicide attempt, would like nothing better than for her to be gone so he can inherit his family's fortune, rather than the allowance he receives from Amanda. Rather than putting Amanda in an asylum, as Thorne suggests, Edward decides to hire a professional nurse to stay with her at the house... or, at least, that's what he tells the doctor. In reality, he finds Esther Harper, a former nurse who he figures is desperate enough for money to do what he tells her to. Offering her $25,000 for the job, he tells her that she's merely to live at the house, keep an eye on Amanda, and to let him know about what goes on there. Most significantly, he tells Esther that if Amanda attempts suicide again, she's to let her do it. During the time Esther stays with Amanda, Edward puts the moves on her, taking her out to dinner and seducing her, and while he insists to her at one point that he has no intention of murdering Amanda, it's soon apparent that he would do it if he needed to. While visiting with Amanda, he turns down an offer to take the house and an increase in the allowance, telling her that he wants everything and, when she brings up the idea of her being murdered, he doesn't deny that he would do it. He adds that he helped Thorne stop her suicide attempt simply to keep up the facade of him being a loving sibling and that she would be the perfect murder victim, given her history of attempted suicide. To that end, he picks up a prescription for Amanda and fills the capsules with a deadly poison. When Esther begins to have doubts about going through with letting Amanda kill herself, Edward uses his slick tongue to keep her from backing out, telling her that it's the best thing they can do, and he also becomes angry when Esther questions him about what's down in the cellar, which is where Amanda appears to want to go when she's sleepwalking. He gives Esther the pills to give to Amanda, but when Amanda ends up not taking them and disappears the next day, Edward arouses Esther's suspicions when he becomes irked at her for not giving Amanda the pills. Tailing Amanda to a church, Edward hides in a confessional and listens to her as she confesses her sins in an attempt to find out how much she knows. Unbeknownst to him, Amanda figures out who he is and ends the confession.

When they drive back to the house that night, Edward all but orders Esther to give Amanda the poisoned pills, telling her that he can't wait any longer. He goes home and, much later, gets a call from Esther telling him that Amanda is now dead. Arriving at the house, he, again, puts on the mask of being a caring brother and acts all distraught about Amanda's death, saying that he and Esther did everything they could to help her. Thinking he now has the family fortune, he's shocked when Dr. Thorne tells him that Amanda wrote a will bequeathing the bulk of it to Esther, and he tries to incriminate her as the murderer, bringing up her history in having married a rich old man and accusing her of forcing Amanda to take the poisoned pills up in her room. But then, Esther tells Edward that Amanda died by jumping off the house's roof, and Thorne also tells him that the previously locked cellar door is now open. Rushing down there, Edward finds that the decaying corpse of Nell, his and Amanda's other sibling, whom they murdered when their father gave all of his wealth over to her, has been uncovered behind the wall they hid it within and is promptly arrested. Thorne then adds that Amanda also left a full confession along with her will, while Esther tells him before he's taken away that she simply couldn't go through with their plan.

Though she's the one who inherited their father's fortune, Amanda Price (Edith Atwater) is far from happy. She's a depressed, miserly recluse who takes no joy in life whatsoever, completely despises her brother, and is so intent upon killing herself that, when she realizes she's still alive at the beginning of the film, she goes, "I'm alive... ohh, damn!" When Edward arranges for Esther Harper to stay with her, Amanda is not at all thrilled with the arrangement, as she suspects that Edward has hired her to spy on her and makes her feelings about it clear to Esther right off the bat, telling her that she's not to move anything out of place and to respect any locked cupboards that she finds about the house. Her suspicions about Esther only grow when she suspects that she and Edward are involved with each other and, when Edward blatantly admits that he will arrange for her to die rather than attempt suicide again, she believes that Esther has been hired to murder her. She feels that's a shame, as she starts to become very fond of Esther the longer she's around, and she also warns her to escape before she gets caught up in the same, unenviable existence that has taken over her and Edward. In addition to her depression and reclusive nature, Amanda also suffers from nightmares that often lead to her sleepwalking, making her way downstairs and to the cellar door. It's revealed in a dream sequence that her nightmares revolve around the guilt she feels of having contributed to her father's death. Amanda basically worshiped her father and took care of his every need when he became ill, but when her younger sister, Nell, came home, all of his affection and attention went to her. In a fit of rage over this, Amanda took a pair of shears to some roses in the house's garden that she and her father had planted together. When he learned of this, her father angrily made up a new will that gave everything to Nell and left Amanda and Edward with nothing. The two of them murdered Nell and seeing this caused their father to die, which led to the breakdown that left Amanda in the state she's now in. The day after having this nightmare where she relives her crimes, Amanda drives to a nearby church, hoping to find divine forgiveness, and goes into a confessional to attempt to purge herself of the guilt that's eating her up. But, she realizes that the "priest" she's talking to is Edward and she promptly leaves. That night, Amanda, who's now broken and resigned to killing herself, kills her pet bird before giving Esther two pieces of paper to mail in the morning and then learning about the poisoned pills Edward gave her. Having now lost all trust in Esther, Amanda attempts to take the pills and end her life, only for Esther to try to stop her. After a struggle, Amanda runs up to the house's roof and jumps off. It's later revealed that the two papers she gave to Esther were a will bequeathing everything to her and a confession pertaining to what she and Edward did to Nell.

While she certainly has more of a life than Amanda, Esther Harper (Antoinette Bower) is akin to her in that she has an unenviable past that's left her with a lot of grief. First seen working as a waitress in a bar that Edward visits, it's revealed that she was once a nurse and married a 90-year old man she was caring for, though she insists it was his doing, as she was the only person he had in his life and she wanted to give her some money as a gift. But, the family intervened after his death to ensure that didn't happen and the publicity of it wrecked her career. While she initially turns down Edward's offer of a job that will net her $25,000, she does eventually take it and meet up with Edward at his office, where she learns the details, specifically that she's not to prevent Amanda from committing suicide a third time. She may not be crazy about that part but she initially decides to go through with it, and she also starts seeing Edward romantically on the side, despite her suspicions that he may turn to murder in order to get what he wants. However, as time goes on and she gets to know Amanda, as well as learn of her family's sad history, she starts to lose her nerve about going through with it, and also starts to dislike the idea of seeing Edward, as that's not what he hired her for. Esther grows to suspect that there's some kind of taboo secret down in the house's cellar, given how Amanda often sleepwalks down to the door while having her nightmares, and realizes that Edward is now trying to murder her when he becomes so angry about her having not given Amanda the pills he'd brought to the house the night before. After the two of them track her down to the church, Edward insists that Esther give Amanda the pills that night, but instead, she stops her from taking them, telling her that she's sure they're poisoned. Amanda is so far gone that she attempts to take them anyway but, while Esther stops her, she's unable to keep her from jumping off the roof of the house to her death. When Edward shows up, acting all distraught, Dr. Thorne reveals Amanda's new will, bequeathing nearly everything to Esther, and when Edward then tries to incriminate Esther in having murdered Amanda, using her past as a motive, she tells him that Amanda jumped rather than taking the pills he rants about. He's then arrested, Esther telling him that she simply couldn't go through with it, and despite getting much of the fortune, Esther leaves the house and tells Mrs. Gonzalez, the old housekeeper, that she's never coming back.

Kent Smith, an actor from old Hollywood who was the male lead in both Cat People and The Curse of the Cat People, makes his final professional curtain call here as Dr. Thorne, the Price family's doctor. He appears at the beginning of the movie when he and Edward prevent Amanda from successfully killing herself and witnesses the hostility between the two siblings. Concerned about this, and unable to get any insight as to why Amanda would want to end her life, Thorne, fearing she'll try it again, first suggests placing her in a mental hospital but then settles for Edward's idea of hiring a professional nurse to stay with her. He appears sporadically throughout the film afterward, first becoming suspicious of Edward when he suggests doubling Amanda's sleeping pill dosage. He later makes a house-call to Amanda, where he learns of her nightmares and sleepwalking from Esther, whom he tells to keep Amanda's prescription in her possession. Thorne also tries to talk Amanda into leaving the house and going on a trip, perhaps visiting her sister Nell abroad, a suggestion she laughs at and says she just might do. Later on, as he's treating Mrs. Gonzalez, the family's housekeeper, he learns that Nell left rather suddenly after her father died and didn't stay for the funeral. Suspicious, he looks up James Price's file, checking his death certificate, and also phones a friend of his at a travel agency to see if Nell left either the day of his death or the following day. That night, he learns that there's no record of her having done so. Heading to a small cafe, Thorne meets a police lieutenant and tells him that he has a hunch Amanda may be in mortal danger due to her knowledge of a possible murder and asks him to accompany him to the Price home. They get there in time to see Esther try to stop Amanda from throwing herself off the roof of the house but to no avail. Later, when Edward shows up and acts all distraught, Thorne tells him of Amanda's will bequeathing nearly all of the fortune to Esther, which leads to Edward incriminating himself in a plot to commit murder when he rants about the poisoned pills he gave her. Once he's arrested, Thorne also informs him of the full confession Amanda wrote him up in addition to the will.

Mrs. Gonzalez (Rita Conde), the Price family's Hispanic housekeeper, is a minor character but has a fairly significant role, in that she's been with the family since all of James Price's children were kids and is the first to inform Esther of the family's troubled dynamic, mentioning the complex relationship between Price and his children and how he favored Nell over the others. She tells both Esther and Dr. Thorne of how Nell left suddenly when their father died, not staying around to attend his funeral, which prompts Thorne to look into. At the end of the movie, when Amanda is dead and Edward has been taken away for murder and attempted murder, Mrs. Gonzalez is devastated, stating that they're all gone, except for James Price, motioning towards his portrait in the house's main hallway. She says her goodbyes to Esther and says that she hopes she will come back at some point but, before she leaves, Esther flat out tells her that she never will return.

Since they're both dead, you only see James Price (Robert Emhardt) and Nell Price (Peg Shirley) during some scenes where Amanda has nightmares about what became of them but you learn enough to know that they were far from good people. James Price is said to have favored Nell over his other children, despite how fond Amanda was of him, and absolutely doted on her, giving her anything she wanted. Nell then ran off and got married, leaving Amanda to nurse and care for her father when he became ill, but then, Nell returned and Price, once again, only had eyes for her. When Amanda confessed to her that she destroyed the roses the two of them planted in the house's garden in a fit of rage, he punishes her by amending his will to where she and Edward receive nothing, while Nell gets everything. In the flashback, Nell is revealed to have been as completely vain and selfish as she was hinted at being, having no pity for Amanda for their father cutting her out of the money and not at all caring about the years Amanda spent tending to their father, only to render it all completely useless when she returned after her husband left her. Moreover, she rubbed it in Amanda's face, commenting on how their father is able to make his feelings very clear, despite how ill he is, and offers to throw her and Edward some money if they act like "good children." This led to a struggle between the two of them when Amanda attempted to take the will from Nell, culminating in her and Edward attacking her together, with Edward strangling her while Amanda bludgeoned her across the head. Their father witnessed this and the shock and horror of it led to him dying of a massive coronary, leaving Edward and Amanda behind to hide Nell's body behind a wall in the cellar and to fight amongst themselves for the family fortune.

This is going to be a very short review because Die Sister, Die! has virtually nothing to it. Like I said in the introduction, while the direction by Randall Hood is certainly competent and there is some good acting to be found here (Edith Atwater gives the best performance as Amanda and Jack Ging and Kent Smith are pretty good too), the movie is ultimately an uninteresting snorefest. The story is so slow, with the significant plot points being presented in such a ho-hum fashion, that it isn't engaging enough to get you interested in the mystery of why Amanda is so depressed and what exactly it is they're hiding in the cellar, and despite the quality of the actors, the characters, regardless of their fairly fleshed out, complex backstories, aren't good enough to make you care where the story is going. Obviously, there's a motif involving financial greed and the effects of one-sided affection, which can be easily cast aside, but the whole thing just sits there and dies. By the end of the movie, after Amanda has succeeded in killing herself, Edward has been arrested, and the full extent of the siblings' crimes has been revealed, you aren't likely to find yourself able to care in the slightest. More than likely, you'll just be glad that this ho-hum mystery thriller has finally ended.

On the technical side of things, while the direction and composition are certainly adequate, they're not enough to offset the rest of the movie's shortcomings. Other than a cliched, rippling effect for the screen during the nightmares/flashbacks that Amanda has, and a few Hitchcockian shots and touchwa here and there, particularly in the scene between Amanda and Edward in the confessional and the moment afterward where she hides from him as he leaves, Hood does little to make the movie stand out visually, with the cinematography being very ho-hum. As you can see from the screenshots, the film doesn't look all that good and I doubt there will ever be a really good-looking print of it, given how obscure and unremarkable it is. I've read so many reviews that comment on this having been intended as a TV movie, given how the frame is in that old-fashioned, square-shape meant for the television, and how there are a lot of close-ups that you would expect to see in a TV film from the 70's, but I don't know if that's really true, given some occasions of graphic violence and a few fairly strong curse words, including "bitch," "shit," and "goddamn." A lot of TV movies made around this time did get theatrical releases in foreign countries, which prompted some filmmakers to shoot such adverse content, but, on its IMDB page, Die Sister, Die! is said to have gone straight to TV in countries like Sweden, while in America, it's listed as having had a theatrical release in December of 1978. Maybe it was shot in a TV-friendly format because of a low budget or something (incidentally, when it was shown on American television, it was given the alternate title, The Companion). In any case, nothing about its look is anything to write home about and the same goes for its setting, which is dominated by the large, mansion-like house that Amanda lives in. You'd expect that place to be somewhat memorable, as it's both Amanda's own personal prison and a personification of the awful existence she and Edward were born into and can never escape, but instead, it's a typical, dime-a-dozen, old house in that "Californian gothic" style, with little to make it stand out apart from some locked cupboards here and there that Amanda tells Esther to leave alone (they're later revealed to be where Nell's personal effects are kept), an enclosed rose garden in one section, the dank cellar where Nell's body is kept (which is only featured at the end and is nothing special in the slightest), and a large painting of James Price in the main hall that seems to be constantly watching over everything. It has very little atmosphere to it, despite how much the characters insist that it does, and doesn't exude an air of claustrophobia and isolation that you would expect, given the circumstances. And the other locations in and around this small, rural community near Los Angeles where the rest of the action takes place is nothing special either.

There are a few instances of bloody violence in the film, like Amanda's slashed wrists at the beginning when she attempts suicide (the idea of slashed wrists, in general, makes me wince), the blood from which is shown to be dripping on the floor, and a fairly disturbing moment where the crazed Amanda takes a knife to her pet bird (you don't see the actual act, though, and the only piece of the aftermath you get is a little bit of blood on Esther's hand in the next scene), but the most notable and grisliest one occurs during the first nightmare Amanda has. She dreams of coming up behind Nell, ripping her head off, twirling the head around, and throwing it against the wall, where it shatters as if it were made plaster. You also see a vision of Amanda's bird walking among some severed hands on the floor, before Esther awakens her. Although they murdered Nell in a bloodless manner, you do get a look of her badly decomposed corpse when it's revealed down in the cellar at the end of the movie.

There no sequences or setpieces in the film that are all that exciting or memorable, either, and those that should, by all accounts, stick out will likely have left your brain a day or two after you've watched it. Those include the opening, where Edward and Dr. Thorne manage to break into Amanda's house and save her after she's attempted suicide, much to her dismay; the dream sequences where Amanda sees herself ripping Nell's head off and shattering it and, later, relives the night where she and Edward both killed Nell and caused their father's death as well, both of which involve Amanda sleepwalking towards the cellar door; the scene in the church where Amanda thinks she's making a confession but realizes that she's been talking to Edward when she sees his hand through the booth and spots one of his distinctive rings; the climax, where Amanda kills her pet bird and struggles with Esther when she reveals that Edward poisoned her pills, leading to a chase up to the house's rooftop, where Amanda jumps to her death; and the ending, where Edward incriminates himself in front of Thorne and discovers that they've already uncovered Nell's corpse down in the cellar. Like I said above, while some of these sequences do have aspects to them that can be rather grisly and startlingly unsettling, they're not the kind of stuff you'll remember. Even though I had watched this movie once before I revisited this year, I didn't remember any of this going back into it. I'm telling you, this movie is the definition of forgettable.

I suppose it's become almost expected and predictable of me to often write off a film's music score as being nothing special at all but, sad to say, Die Sister, Die! can't even claim to have a memorable score to pick up some of the slack of everything else, as I don't remember a single note from it. It's a shame, too, because the composer, Hugo Friedhofer, was someone who'd been scoring movies since the 30's, had won an Oscar for his work on the 1946 film, The Best Years of Our Lives, was nominated many other times, and worked with directors like Alfred Hitchcock and William Castle. In fact, this ended up being his last score, as he was so devastated by the death of Randall Hood that he decided to retire (he died only a few years after the movie was released). Shame he couldn't have gone out with something that was at least a little memorable.

I apologize if this review wasn't all that interesting but that's what happens when you try to talk about a throwaway movie like Die Sister, Die!. It may have some okay direction, pretty good performances, and some surprisingly grisly moments, but it's a blase, by-the-numbers, and ultimately forgettable mystery thriller with just a few horror touches. The story and mystery are not interesting, the characters themselves are not engaging enough to make you care about them or the plot they're caught up in, little about the movie sticks out on a technical or visual level, including the crucial setting of Amanda's large house, none of the major scenes or sequences are likely to stick with you, and the music score is in one ear and out the other. Despite some favorable IMDB user reviews, it's not surprising that the movie currently only has a 4.7 rating, as that perfectly encapsulates it: not horrible, but certainly not good or memorable at all.