What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was a smash, spawning the sub-genre of Hagsploitation Horror. Of course, they had to make a sequel. A thematic sequel that would be compared to Baby Jane, and of course suffer by that comparison. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad movie, far from it. Too much talent for that to happen. Once again Lukas Heller adapts a novel by Henry Farrell, once again Robert Aldrich directs and once again Bette Davis stars. Many department heads remain the same.
A key difference that was to be expected is that Joan Crawford was not invited back. Instead, we get Olivia de Havilland. There’s also Agnes Moorehead, Joseph Cotten. Mary Astor, George Kennedy and Bruce Dern. The canvas here is bigger, and so are the performances. There’s more confidence in the tone than with Baby Jane, but the drama and Kentucky Fried accents bring this deeper into camp. These elements make the dark surprises into something like opera, and it’s fun to see the cast go big enough to hit the ceiling, until they finally smash through it.
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