So yeah, uh. Boo!
SAVAGE INTRUDER aka HOLLYWOOD HORROR HOUSE
From 1969, it’s a bizarre mashup/rip-off of Sunset Boulevard, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Big Cube, among others. It stars Miriam Hopkins as an aging alcoholic star of the 1930’s who is cooped up in her mansion in the Hollywood Hills, with nobody but the imaginary guests who come over while she’s on one of her benders. During the day, she’s looked after by wrinkly secretary Gale Sondergaard. What she doesn’t know is that there’s a creepy hippie played by John Garfield Jr. running around murdering and dismembering women in the Hollywood area. And somehow, despite his scruffy appearance and oddly confrontational nature, he gets himself hired as her nurse!
Once he’s hired, he basically gets the Wiliam Holden treatment - scenes are lifted verbatim from the Billy Wilder flick - and starts screwing around with Hopkins, taking her out to wild hippie parties and bringing the guests (who include midgets, queers, and whores) back to the apartment. He’s also screwing the Asian cook, Greta, to whom he’s so politically insensetive that he affectionately calls her “a fortune cookie,” and later when she denies him something says, “Ah, I see, No Ticky, No Washy!” Oh, and he murders her when she gets pregnant. Somehow, inexplicably, nobody is able to fire this utterly creepy guy who can’t act for shit.
Hopkins is desperate to become a star again, and her one public appearance - in the tacky Hollywood Boulevard Christmas Parade of 1968 ends in disaster. She tells a reporter that the Strip isn’t the same as it used to be, “now the whores and queers have taken over.” Oiy Veh! Call YouTube! There’s also great hippie acid trip flashback moments - Garfield Jr.’s memories of his mother getting gang-banged by 5 guys ends up more funny than scary
What’s really sad about the film is that poor Hopkins, who had a legitimate bitter feud with Bette Davis all her life (Davis hated her upstaging, Hopkins hated Davis for having an affair with one of her husbands) clearly thought she could resucitate her career by playing a character who’s a knock off Norma Desmond and Baby Jane rolled into one. And you can tell that she’s pretty sick during the film, at one point she just disappears and we never see her again. That was it - her final role.
All in all, it’s not a must see, but if you’re at all a fan of the genre - this is pretty high camp. Lots to laugh at, including the supposedly scary moments. .