I recall seeing this movie a few years ago. The plot involved some psycho guy who kidnapped a young woman and kept her chained up in the basement. He slowly starved her to death, then moved out, leaving her there. Then he moved into a new place and started all over again with another victim. Anyone recall this movie and its title?
It sounds something like The Collector (1965), but in that movie he ended up killing his abductee and burying her on the property. Very upsetting story.
I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the Collector. I think it was a more recent release than 1965. All I really recall is that he is starving her on purpose, brainwashing her at the same time to accept it. And scenes where he brings her a plate of plain white rice but puts/holds it just out of her reach. She stares at the rice with desperation, but he takes it away each time.
Sounds like the director’s cut of Willy Wonka.
Huh?
Sounds vaguely similar to Silence of the Lambs, only Buffalo Bill killed the girls her starved to make their skin into textiles.
I know TSOTL is based loosely on several IRL serial killers…could your movie be the story of one of them?
Ed Gein in particular.
Maybe. All I really recall is that the starvation itself was the point, not to do anything else to the victim before or after death.
I took the liberty of posting your question on the IMDB board. One person suggested the 1998 classic “Starved:”
FYI, it is not just fiction, lots and lots of true stories for that movie to be based on.
E.g, a true case on court tv not too long ago, where an unarmed(obviously) woman was abducted and put into her own car trunk, and left there to starve to death. She lived for a very long time, many many days, endlessly pleading to be left out. I think she finnally died after drinking some windshield washer solvent or anti-freeze that was in the car trunk.
The abductors, male and female, heard her the entire time, and ignored all of her pleas for help, and drove all around the city day after day with that poor woman in her own car trunk pleading to be let out, or at least to be given food or water or to be let to go to a bathroom.
Warning to all women!!:
Please do not allow yourself to be abducted nor be put into a car trunk, nor placed in someones basement(its not a good idea).
Really? You don’t say…
q-tipper: Nope, that wasn’t the motivation in Silence of the Lambs, nor was it the same ending. I read the plot on the Starved link that Earl posted - that might be the one you’re thinking of, it seems.
Ya think I wouldnt have to mention it?
But you would be surprised how many naive women are out there. Each one of them thinking it will happen to “someone else”, not them. Each one thinking that the police will protect them, with most of them totally defenseless and unprepared for when someone does try to abduct them.
It is not The Collector you are thinking of. In that film–based on a novel which, in turn, was based loosely on a true story–Terence Stamp wins a lottery and uses the money to buy a huge old house in the country. He then kidnaps Samantha Eggar, a woman he used to admire every day on the bus as he commuted to work, but was afraid to talk to. He keeps her locked in a sort of apartment he builds for her in the basement but, far from starving her, provides her home cooked meals, a new wardrobe, books, etc., in the pathetic hope he can make her fall in love with him.
There is, however, a similarity in that there is a scene at the end where Stamp, in voice-over narration, observes that his plan with Eggar probably didn’t work because she was so “la-de-da”. As he says it, he is following a woman of lower social class.
Neither does the story appear to resemble anything to do with Ed Gein. At last word, IIRC, Gein is still only definitely proven to have killed one woman, the mother of the police officer who arrested him. He did, however, collect bodies from the local cemetery, and he once remarked to his coworkers on a road crew that he had killed a couple of teenage girls who had recently disappeared.
At the time, everyone thought he was joking. There is an allusion to this at the end of the original, classic, version of Psycho, in which Simon Oakland, the psychiatrist, asks the sherrif, John McIntyre, if there had been any unsolved disappearances of young women a few years back–Norman’s “mother” had talked about that during their interview.
From a synopsis I’ve read, Starved might be your best bet.
This is about a film, so I’ll move this thread to our arts forum, Cafe Society.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
Well, since the OP seems to have (presumably) gotten his answer, I’m going to hijack his thread momentarily with another “movie about a woman in the basement” question. I only saw maybe ten minutes of it on cable TV back in the early eighties. We had showtime/movie channel back then, so I’m assuming it was a feature release and not made-for-TV.
Anyway, the bad guy wears a strange mask that looks like a normal face except that the eye holes are simply empty black spaces. In the scene I saw he was sitting at a dressing table of some kind talking to himself with a weird deep voice, before going down into the basement where he had a woman chained to a pole, or something similar. Then he straps her down onto a bed or gurney, and starts putting plaster over her face. He works slowly, saving her mouth/nose for last, but the obvious motive is that he’s cutting off her airway and killing her. Now, it was about this point that my five-year-old self went running back upstairs in a cold sweat so I don’t know any of the other plot points. Anyone recognize this description? It starred in many a childhood nightmare, and I’m curious about what it might have been.
In addition to killing Bernice Worden–decapitating and then gutting her like a deer–Gein eventually confessed to the murder of tavern owner Mary Hogan, who disappeared three years before Worden’s murder and Gein’s arrest. Worden was in fact the mother of the Plainfield deputy, Frank Worden.
It’s definitely the movie STARVED. I had the misfortune to rent that atrocious Grade-Z piece of shit from Netflix. Unreedeming in every way.
Similarly, I took the liberty of posting your question on the IMDB board, also. One person suggested that it might be the 1979 Chuck Connors (“The Rifleman,” “Branded,” etc.) potboiler Tourist Trap.
“Ruthless People”?
D&R