When is a Robert Aldrich movie not a Robert Aldrich movie? Kino Lorber answers that with their Blu-ray of the granny guignol pic WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO AUNT ALICE?

Socialite Mrs. Marrable (Geraldine Page, SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH) is not quite the merry widow when she learns that all her husband left her was a stack of hospital bills and his stamp collection. She finds it a little easier to keep up appearances in the Arizona desert where her stockbroker nephew George Lawson (Peter Brandon, ALTERED STATES) and his wife Julia (Joan Huntington, YOUNG FURY) live, each under mutual impression that the other is wealthy and financially beneficial to them. Mrs. Marrable hits upon an idea of how to continue living in the manner to which she is accustomed by tricking her housekeepers into investing their life savings and then murdering them and burying them under the pine trees she plants in her desert oasis of a garden. She soon finds herself in danger of exposure when she takes on new housekeeper Mrs. Dimmock (Ruth Gordon, ROSEMARY'S BABY) who starts asking questions about previous housekeeper Miss Tinsley (Mildred Dunnock, BABY DOLL); but is it idle curiosity or something more? Also lurking around the periphery spying on Mrs. Marrable's property for reasons unknown is racecar engineer Mike Darrah (LARAMIE's Robert Fuller) who has started courting young widow Harriet Vaughn (Rosemary Forsyth, SHENANDOAH) who has moved into the cottage across from Mrs. Marrable, and whose son Jim (Michael Barbera) has taken a liking to the stray dog that keeps trying to dig up her pine trees.

The third of Aldrich's hagsploitation gothics – following WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? and HUSH...HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE – and the only one not directed by him, WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO AUNT ALICE? is a disappointingly uneven film. Page is deliciously bitch and contemptuous, never sympathetic but still the most entertaining of a rotten bunch in comparison to her swinging nephew and his wife. Gordon is also given a meatier role than usual, always spry but also sympathetic even before we know her real motivations when portraying herself to her employer as a widow who seeming lack of friends and family to care for her in her old age is of her own doing. Their scenes together are the film's high points, and the cat and mouse baiting between them should have been the entire film. Unfortunately, the supporting characters and their relationships are quite dull with the exception of the scene with Harriet's incredulous reaction to Mrs. Marrable and the Lawsons seeming to blame a victim for their own seemingly accidental death and concentrate on the employer's emotional upset. The color photography of Joseph Biroc – whose previously shot Aldrich's THE KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE and THE LEGEND OF LYLAH CLARE, and whose previous genre credits include THE BAT as well as William Castle's 13 GHOSTS and I SAW WHAT YOU DID – nicely contrasts the arid desert setting with the oppressive interiors of Mrs. Marrable's Arizona abode but the usually dependable Gerard Fried – whose genre masterwork was for Ted Post's THE BABY of all films! – seems to bludgeon the viewer with his score to wring some sense of momentum from the action.

Released theatrically by Cinerama Releasing Corporation, WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO AUNT ALICE? was released on tape by Fox's Magnetic Home Video in the early 1980s. Anchor Bay licensed the film from co-producer ABC Pictures and released it on DVD in 2000 as a barebones anamorphic DVD followed by an MGM edition in 2004, both long out of print. Kino Lorber's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray is derived from a new 4K scan of the original camera negative, and the results are great in the context of the film's production. Fine detail is there in hair, facial features, wardrobe and the locations while the studio interiors tend to given themselves away as such; in the case of the latter, it may or may not be pleasing to the film fan when they can easily see the difference between a location shot and a studio-lensed insert like a scene with Gordon in a phone booth where the artificial foliage behind her is apparent as such in the close-up). The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono track boast clear dialogue and scoring, although it makes all the more apparent the degree to which Fried's score hammers away. Optional English SDH subtitles are included.