"You pay for the whole seat - you only use the edge!" promised the ad campaign for the hagsploitation gorefest DEAR DEAD DELILAH, but will it still shock viewers on Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome.

In 1943 Nashville, pregnant, hair-lipped Luddy (Ann Gibbs, PRIVATE PARTS) did not take kindly to her mother's home truths about the soldier who seduced and abandoned her, so she chopped her up and went out on the town in a bloodstained dress. Thirty years later, Luddy (stage actress/director Patricia Carmichael) is released from prison and returns to Nashville, but she has nowhere to stay. Fortunately, she is knocked off her feet by rough-housing Richard (ALL MY CHILDREN's Robert Gentry) during a game of football and invited by his meek wife Ellen (Elizabeth Eis) to recuperate at South Hall, the ancestral home of the Charles family where Ellen plays nursemaid to her domineering aunt Delilah (Agnes Moorehead, THE BAT), matriarch of the family who holds her own mortality and control of the estate over her family: alcoholic man-eater sister Grace (Anne Meacham, THE GARDENER), unlicensed doctor and heroin addict Alonzo (DARK SHADOWS' Dennis Patrick), embezzler Morgan (Michael Ansara, DAY OF THE ANIMALS) – who has arrived with his latest lush of a sugar mama Buffy (Ruth Baker) – and attorney cousin Roy (Will Geer, THE MAFU CAGE). Luddy is hired as the housekeeper and becomes privy to the family's dirty laundry but finds a confidante in Ellen who vows to keep her past a secret, and Alonzo who has also spent some time in prison for getting an underage girl pregnant and now dreams of turning South Hall into a home for children. Claiming to be guided by her father's spirit, Delilah announces one night at dinner that she is willing South Hall to the state along with the funds to maintain it, and leaving her family the sum of five thousand dollars each; however, she challenges them to find their father's legendary "horse money," six hundred thousand dollars made off of an insurance scam that she tells them is secreted somewhere on the estate (offering up a foul-smelling sample of the vintage bills as proof). As the siblings scour the grounds for the hidden loot, someone starts taking them out with an axe: has a hallucinating Luddy gone back to her old ways, is someone trying to drive her crazy, or is papa's ghost really wielding the axe?

A Nashville-lensed late regional take on the "hagsploitation" genre initiated by Robert Aldrich's WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? and his follow-ups and popularized by Curtis Harrington's WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH HELEN? and WHOEVER SLEW AUNTIE ROO? on the high end and the likes of THE SAVAGE INTRUDER on the low end, DEAR DEAD DELILAH also has the honor of being the only directorial effort of horror novelist John Farris whose WHEN MICHAEL CALLS had been adapted as a TV movie the same year and whose THE FURY would be Brian De Palma's big-budget telekinetic follow-up to CARRIE. Taking after Aldrich's HUSH, HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE! with its combination of Southern Gothic trappings and severed body parts, Farris' film is more than a bit muddled but the entertaining cast of character actors get more screen time than in more mainstream supporting roles and there are some surprising gore effects, including a decapitation by assailant on horseback that leaves behind a twitching torso and a face blasted by a shotgun. The exposition is more soapy than macabre, and the twist can be seen coming a mile away while ultimately squandering the red herrings it has set up for misdirection that might have provided a more satisfactory twist and even failing to make the "happy" ending more subversive. Composer Bill Justis would later score SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT and ISLAND CLAWS, but his main claim to fame was 1957 rock instrumental "Raunchy" later covered by The Beatles.

Given scant theatrical release by short-lived distributor Southern Star – whose logo opens the presentation – DEAR DEAD DELILAH gained much of its audience from television airings as part of Avco Embassy's television package and an early 1980s Embassy VHS tape. Scanned and restored in 2K from 35mm vault elements, Vinegar Syndrome's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray is fairly clean, but its dark and gritty image is true to the original cinematography (hagsploitation it may be, but it's no Robert Aldrich production). Well-exposd scenes have a rather flat TV-movie ambience while the night exteriors are underexposed and grainy. The end credits underline actor credits with their fates, which includes one gore shot cut from the film itself (either at the behest of the MPAA or for the shock value of discovering the corpse after the fact). The DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 mono track is fairly clean and optional English SDH subtitles are included.