Ellie

Shelley Winters. Pat Paulsen.

ELLIE is a low budget little skin flick from America with a southern feel. The main character is a young woman who suffers at the hands of an evil step-brother and her lecherous siblings, so with murder in mind she decides to teach the whole lot of them a lesson.

Ellie is the latest award-winning short by Matthew Garrett. It is a most gritty, yet beautiful film.

The casting in this movie is phenomenal. Darcy Miller makes you believe that you truly exist in her character's sad world, and takes you on a journey through emotion and circumstance.

With the first gag in the movie being someone falling face first into a pig pen, I got a good feeling as to what the remaining eighty-eight or so minutes of "Ellie" would be like, and I was proved to be correct. I know that it was supposed to be a comedy, but the level of humor here is so juvenile and predictable that it provokes hostility from the viewer instead.

The first time I watched "Ellie", I didn't really know what was going on. I thought it was pretty strange.

From whichever domain that currently houses the soul of Aeschylus might be heard rapid rotative sounds if the author of the Oresteian Trilogy would happen to be cognizant of this obvious but perfunctory adaptation, as advertised by the film's producers, of the timeless conflict between Elektra and Clytemnestra. Shelley Winters performs as Cora, a widow whose bereavement is due to homicidal inclinations that she shares with her three sons, their prey a string of husbands, men who are qualified by financial worth while being fatally fond of the well-upholstered finagler.

Treacherous Cora (robustly played with mucho lip-smacking gusto by the incomparable Shelley Winters) marries men and then murders them for their money. Cora more than meets her match in Ellie (a spunky performance by juicy blonde beauty Sheila Kennedy), who's the smart and sexy daughter of Cora's latest victim.