Bitchy, Bickering Bitches.
It’s been a pretty wild December, with us covering off-kilter films like the much-maligned Batman & Robin and the not-as-bad-as-you-think Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings. Now for a special holiday treat, we’re covering Herbert Ross‘ 1973 mystery The Last of Sheila, which not only inspired Rian Johnson’s Knives Out (review) and Glass Onion (review), but was also the only screenwriting collaboration between famous queers Anthony Perkins (yes, that one) and Stephen Sondheim (yes, that one)!
In the film, movie producer Clinton Greene (James Coburn) invites a group of friends to spend a week on his yacht a year after his wife Sheila (Yvonne Romaine) was killed in a hit-and-run accident. While the plan is to have them play a scavenger hunt mystery game, it comes with a hidden agenda: exposing their worst secrets and possibly revealing one of them as Sheila’s killer. Is it Alice the actress (Raquel Welch), her talent-manager husband Anthony (Ian McShane), secretary turned talent agent Christine (Dyan Cannon), film director Phillip (James Mason), screenwriter Tom Parkman (Richard Benjamin) or his wife Lee (Joan Hackett)? For this group of privileged Hollywood elite, the game turns out to be all too real and all too deadly.
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Episode 209: The Last of Sheila (1973)
Give us a glass of water and a couple of lesbians because we’re joining iconic queers Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim for an evening of games, bitchery and murder in 1973’s The Last of Sheila! Joining us for the conversation is the co-host of the Midnight Mass Podcast: Michael Varrati!
Join us as we go all in on this complex murder mystery/Hollywood satire filled with a cast of pretty reprehensible characters (in the words of our guest: it’s a problematic scenario populated by problematic people) while admiring the sheer audacity of Perkins and Sondheim’s clever script.
Plus: hot Ian McShane, Angela Lansbury tea, Raquel Felch, a “little child molester” who technically wins the movie, and a surprising fact about Joel Schumacher!
Cross out The Last of Sheila!
Coming up on Wednesday: We’re getting super queer with a look at Erlingur Thoroddsen’s Into the Dark entry: “Midnight Kiss”!
P.S. Subscribe to our Patreon for more than 211 hours of additional content! We’re wrapping up the year with episodes on supersized slasher Terrifier 2, Into The Dark’s holiday-themed New Year, New You, Joe Begos’ killer robot Santa film Christmas Bloody Christmas, Luca Guadagnino’s cannibal love story Bones and All, Rian Johnson’s whodunnit sequel Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, and an audio commentary on the best horror sequel of all-time: Scream 2, just in time for its 25th anniversary!