This is one of those cheap horror flicks that was made strictly for video and you just can't take a film like this seriously so either skip it altogether or just have fun watching it. Story has a granny (Stella Stevens) who's family comes for a visit but they really try to knock her off for her inheritance. A strange man named Namon Ami (Luca Bercovici) comes by and gives her a potion that will give her eternal life but she can't allow it to be subjected to sunlight or else! Well, or else happens and when granny finally drinks it she later turns into a demon and she starts killing everyone in her family. The film is bloody and gory but its not the type of gore thats realistic so it remains on a lightweight level which helps the viewer. Of course in this type of exploitation there is nudity and Shannon Whirry and Heather Elizabeth Parkhurst are eye popping beautiful! No reason to really dislike this film because since it doesn't take itself seriously and the humor is tongue in cheek why would a viewer pick this apart? If you like these low budget horror films this one has some genuinely funny moments so just sit back and have fun!
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rosscinema20 June 2003
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This dark comedy features a spirited performance by Stella Stevens as "Granny". The actors have great makeup, and there is rarely a dull moment. Granny on her deathbed is chosen to get a second chance at life and immortality. Unfortunately the carefully explained three step process gets derailed by a cat, and Granny comes back from the dead seeking revenge on her jackal-like family. There are a few similarities between "The Granny" and "Ed and His Dead Mother", which precedes this film by two years. A couple low budget effects slightly detract, like in the fur closet when hand puppet minks attack, but overall the movie succeeds as entertainment. Shannon Whirry and Heather Elizabeth Parkhurst showing some skin doesn't hurt either. - MERK
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Coventry20 December 2009Surprisingly entertaining tongue-in-cheek little horror flick of the mid-90's that is undeservedly obscure and unloved. The film has a relatively original premise – with a few identifiable moments of comedy – about a wealthy grandmother who's offered the chance to gain immortality by a mysterious hermit who shows up at her ; under the condition that she makes peace with her family on Thanksgiving Day. That's easier said than done, however, as her family is a collection of greedy vultures and sleaze scumbags that cannot wait for granny to die so that they can finally sell the parental house and inherit the family fortune. Only the geeky but obviously stunningly beautiful granddaughter Kelly genuinely cares for Granny with all her heart. Granny ignores the condition, drinks the potion and dies at the spot. The family is very happy, of course, especially since they clumsily altered the testament themselves, but granny soon after returns as a vengeful and bloodthirsty demon. The grotesque death sequences benefit from goody gruesome make-up effects (one woman is eaten by her fur coat, another one has his penis bitten off, etc ) and there are quite a lot of tasteless and blackly comical gags on taboo topics like incest. The final act of the film becomes quite ridiculous; especially when all the massacred family members return as demons as well to complete their Thanksgiving diner. The climax battle also definitely outstays its welcome, but hey, certain little flaws are easy to forgive. Last but not least, there's some fantastically gratuitous and more than welcome nudity, provided by the extremely hot female starlets Shannon Whirry (a former soft core actress) and the voluptuous Heather Parkhurst (a former bikini advertisement model).
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demonictoys5529 April 2001At first when I saw this movie I thought it was gonna be another one of those cheap lame horror films that made no sense. But to my surprise I enjoyed it. Basically it's about an old woman who recieves a visit by a man and he gives her a bottle that is considered to be the "The Fountain of Eternal Youth". She doesn't follow the rules right drinks it, dies, and later comes back from the dead to kill off her greedy family. If you like a movie that has bad launguage, nudity, and blood rent this one. Hey, I gave it a 10 straight up!
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mls418221 March 2021Horribly painful for Stella Stevens fans to watch. She couldn't have been paid enough to make this worth it. All copies of this film should be destroyed.
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Groverdox23 January 2019As far as I can tell "The Granny" is the only horror movie that softcore siren Shannon Whirry starred in. Like everything else she ever had top billing in, it went straight to video, and in this case, I had never even heard of it.
The film opens with a flashback to ancient times. A woman is being exorcised, lying on a bed, her wrists in shackles. Her face is deformed, her voice is obviously downtuned, and she even throws up. I guess they couldn't afford the special effect to make her head spin around.
The movie outdoes "The Exorcist" in terms of blood, though, if that's a plus to anyone. The possessee grabs her father by the head (even though her wrists were just in shackles?) and apparently gouges his eyes. She then forces his head between his legs before snapping his neck.
These people are attired as though they are in the middle ages, but they have American accents.
Twice the possessed woman is able to appear as her unpossessed form to ensnare the silly men who crowd around her. The second time, she becomes young and beautiful, and bares her breasts, providing nudity in the first ten minutes.
The possessed woman is apparently defeated... by sunlight. Um, is she a vampire as well?
Extraordinarily, this movie's cinematography was done by Wally Pfister, who aside from having a legendarily unfortunate name, also did the photography for "The Dark Knight"!
The first post-credits scene shows the beautiful Shannon Whirry, here bespectacled and pony tailed, doting on the titular "granny", who has a harsh voice, and is demanding and a little bit unpleasant. She feels that her other family members are vultures after her money, but she will provide for Whirry, not them. Though she also tells Whirry that nobody would have her.
The hated family members, described by Granny as "a pack of jackals", arrive. (It is Thanksgiving). It is true that they don't seem to care much for Granny, or family in general: one woman plans to stay drunk all weekend, and a boy describes Granny as a corpse you can't kill. They also disparage Shannon Whirry's character, as a perceived loser.
We then see masculine hands putting some white powder into soup.
Granny tells everyone else to go away because she wants to watch wrestling.
Dorothy Parker was wrong: some women look stunning with glasses, Whirry included.
When the obnoxious teenage boy (who looks older) calls wrestling fake, Granny tries to start a fight with him!
But then a priest arrives. In a private conversation, Granny reiterates that Whirry is the only member of her family with a decent bone in her body, but when the priest calls her beautiful, Granny strongly disagrees. The priest gives her some kind of potion which buzzes as though with electrical energy and she is able to get up out of her wheelchair.
The priest reveals that he knows Granny gave over a million dollars to humanitarian courses, but cut her family out of her will. He says the potion will make her live forever - and wants for her to become part of an international movement of goodness. He gives her three wishes - no sunlight on the potion, perform a cleansing ritual before you take it, and... we miss out on hearing the last one.
Whirry, despite being so decent, eavesdrops on this conversation secretly.
Sunlight will cause the elixir to mutate.
The elixir mutates almost immediately, and even changes colour, becoming blood red. Granny's cat licks some of it up and mutates into a bad special effect.
When Granny goes to eat her soup, everybody freezes, apparently all knowing it is poisoned. Good on Granny - she doesn't eat it, but she does say to her son "You're the load I should have swallowed!"
I know this lady is supposed to be unpleasant, but come on, how can you not love a lady who would say something like that? She's hilarious.
She collapses anyway.
Inexplicably, they get her a doctor. Why would you get a doctor for someone you just tried to kill?
It is revealed that her evil family (cursed by greed, says Shannon Whirry) have falsified her will.
She comes to in bed, and is seen by a weird doctor, but it becomes clear that she's going to die.
Granny tries and fails to perform her cleansing ritual, and drinks more of the elixir, seeming to choke on it. Finally, she dies.
A lawyer reads the fraudulent will to her family, Whirry included. They have faked it so that they each get a share of her $170 million dollar fortune, but Shannon only gets $1.
The family have a big party, not even trying to hide their joy.
Shannon has a heart-to-heart with the youngest member of the family, a little girl, who is the only other one who isn't evil.
Upstairs, one of the guys cheats with one of the girls. Perhaps they are in-laws. She shows him her breasts.
We get a scene in the morgue around Granny's body, where the coroner is with his girlfriend, and both are southern and apparently a little slow. The woman wants to steal the ring from Granny's finger. When the man tries to use an electric blade to cut her finger off and remove the ring, Granny comes back to life and uses it on him. Like the previous eye-gouging scene, there's a lot of blood, but it doesn't look too realistic.
Back in Granny's house, two other in-laws are also looking to have sex, while the reanimated Granny comments from outside, and you know she's going to get some vengeance.
She slices him up with a scalpel, again, not in much detail.
We finally get some topless nudity from Shannon at almost exactly the one hour mark.
One of the ladies retires to Granny's attic, I guess, and strips to her petty coat. She makes a lot of strange, almost sexual noises, while draping herself in Granny's fur. A brief shot shows her topless, but then the scene cuts and she's dressed again. Was this a continuity error?
As this is a horror movie, and she has gone off on her own, you know what's going to happen next: Granny appears. The furs all come alive, however unrealistically, and we get the most violent death scene so far, as they rip the skin from her neck, showing what it looks like underneath.
We get more nudity from that lady who showed her breasts to the guy before. Were they just getting their money's worth? Either way, she's nothing compared to the beauty we just witnessed when Whirry undressed. Her breasts are so obviously fake that they look weird. Inexplicably, she dances alone, topless, in front of the mirror.
One of the other guys in enticed by a woman we know to be Granny in a different form. She seems to be going down on him, but keeps putting her head up intermittently, until, of course, she turns into Granny, and I guess we are supposed to think that she bit his wang off.
A showdown between Granny and Shannon Whirry is delayed by a family dinner sequence in which all of the now deceased family members are reanimated - although none of them drank the potion?
Even Granny's long dead husband comes back, a decrepit corpse, though he should really just be a skeleton.
The priest guy from before comes back, apparently to save the day, even though this whole thing is basically his fault - as Granny quite rightly tells him.
The final fight scene is predictably tedious and generates no excitement whatsoever. but the movie does have a pretty cool final scene.
I enjoyed moments of "The Granny", but overall, thought it was pretty average and forgettable. -
cool_cool_117 February 2006The Matriarch (1995) is a pretty boring horror movie it has to be said!! Granny (Stella Stevens) gets a visit from a strange man who gives her this potion that he claims will give her eternal life, while this is going on Granny's Granddaughter Kelly (Shannon Whirry) is preparing dinner for all Granny's nasty, greedy, money seeking relatives.
All these nasty relatives want Granny dead and want all her money and fortune, after the dinner, granny decides to drink the potion but it ends up killing her...... temporarily!!! She then returns as some zombie type creature, killing off all the horrible relatives one by one, it ends up with a good vs evil battle, with granny having a climatic battle with her nice innocent granddaughter Kelly.
The Matriarch is quite a boring horror, there's blood and killings but not really any good gore and the film drags on, i give the movie 3/10 but thats only coz i like Stella Stevens and Shannon Whirry! -
capkronos18 February 2000The people who have reviewed THE GRANNY here are obviously NOT horror movie fans, and thus should stick to reviewing films like FREE WILLY, PART 10. Anyway... What an improvement for Luca (GHOULIES, ROCKULA) Bercovici, who wrote, directed and co-stars! THE GRANNY is wonderful, tasteless fun and easily one of the best direct-to-video horror films of the decade.
Stella Stevens is not only the Granny of the title, but the reigning Granny of B-grade direct-to-video flicks. She's terrific chewing the scenery as Anastasia Gargoli, mother to some rather objectionable jerks who (along with their children) are trying to kill her for her inheritance. The only person kind to Granny is her bastard niece Kelly (well played by soft-core queen Shannon Whirry). Before dying, a magical elixir that promises eternal life is injested, and ends up backfiring. Since Kelly is screwed out of an inheritance, Granny returns as a cannibalistic zombie to settle the score.
THE GRANNY is thankfully played out in tongue-in-cheek fashion, so we get a lot of black comedy (such as gags involving incest, decapitation, castration, grave robbing and more). Gore FX are effective and creative, but pretty mediocre. The performances are campy and fun.
On the negative side, the tone of the movie (fluctuating from camp to drama to comedy to horror) may turn some off, and the (open) ending is unnecessary. But in a movie with this much energy and good things going for it, those aspects are quite easy to overlook. -
merylfan22 October 1998I've been studying film half my life, and THE GRANNY is without any question the most abysmal, disgusting movie I've ever laid eyes on. And I've seen some bad movies! Stella Stevens is unwatchable, the script is beneath contempt, and I wouldn't wish this movie on my worst enemy. To be avoided like the bubonic plague.
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MYaGuitar6 September 2021I love this movie, camp fun, it does not disappoint. It's actually scarier than you'd think, and hilarious. A must-watch for those who love dark humor.
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jimmyplm12 December 1999I read some of the user comments on this movie and I was kind of shocked to see that all I saw was negative comments about this movie. To say it is the worst movie ever made is ridiculous. I found it to be quite a good film. There was a lot of gore for horror fans, a lot of funny one-liners (like with Freddy in the Nightmare on Elm Street series) for those looking for laughs, and a cast of characters that you actually loved to watch get killed off. Oh, and the actress that plays the seductive Antoinette was very fun to watch. My only complaint is that I can't figure out for the life of me why movie-makers will always put glasses on a female character (who is obviously very attractive) and then act like all the characters think she's ugly. Is being visually impaired such an ugly thing in America? Well, anyway, I think this is a great movie for die-hard horror fans. Just don't watch it if you're one of those uptight movie-goers
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Foreverisacastironmess1236 March 2023So this is one seriously schlocky horror comedy and I do reckon that if you don't appreciate the comedy or tone right away then you'll probably find it to be a bit of a horrible viewing experience. However if you do enjoy it knowing it's not at all meant to be taken seriously you might have a lot more fun as it a lot of laughs! So I just love Shelly Stevens in it, she was just epic and her titular character gave zero craps and spouted the foulmouthed one-liners like she was Freddy Krueger, and I found the scene especially hilarious when she's still a regular old lady and was choking on the word dime while tearing into her horrible moneygrubbing family, but I thought she was even funnier still when she was resurrected as a demon granny who just loved being pure evil!! She really gave it her all and it's a good example of just one performance carrying and raising an otherwise unremarkable movie above the average and for me, even making it a bit of a hidden gem. I love what a great job they did of making granny's family just the worst kind of arrogant selfish people that you really couldn't wait to see her butcher them! They're so mean that they're not even willing to wait and let nature take its course and let granny die naturally, but try to speed up the process! A lot of the acting is very goofy and exaggerated, and it makes for a very tacky and cheesy tone, but because of that and not in spite of it, I just find the movie a lot of fun, it was fast paced. Not every joke lands but everyone seemed to get that they were in a silly horror comedy that I think was meant to be a bit of a sendup of similar B-movies. The scene where devil grandma repeatedly powerslams her grandson while commenting like a wrestling match is again damn funny and not to be missed! It gets really wacky towards the end when she's slaughtered and turned almost the whole family into monster zombie people and they're all laughing like maniacs around the dinner table, of which the visual was giving me some serious Night of the Demons and Beetlejuice vibes! I actually felt a bit bad for the fate that befell granny, becoming a bloodthirsty demented monster from hell and turning against the one relative that she did actually care about in her own cranky and borderline abusive way, she didn't seem all that bad before she changed, just old and understandably bitter as she was surrounded by people who didn't care about her and only wanted her money, except for two. No one gets what they want in this movie - the family of greedy jerks get nothing, granny gets no love and eternal life, and even Kelly doesn't get to be with the mysterious exorcist preacher man that she seemed to fall for at first sight. At least granny came out on top in the loony final scene! Something that really doesn't work for a second is how they tried to dress down Shannon Whirry and make her all plain and homely, she's clearly a vixen even under the librarian exterior! So I think that this odd but very fun horror comedy is more than entertaining and funny enough to stand out among other 90s horror romps like Wishmaster and Warlock The Armageddon, it has no conscience, it's phenomenally cheesy, and I sure laughed my butt off at it, I can't believe I missed out on it as a kid because I know I would have loved it, it's got the making of a cult classic if it isn't one already. A very underrated and fun campy horror comedy indeed, one that's well worth checking out, so give The Granny some sugah! X.
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brandonsites198125 May 2002Granny (Stella Stevens) has had it with her family. They are greedy, ruthless people who probably want her dead. And how right she is, as they try to attempt to poision her on Thanksgiving day and change her will so they inherit everything. The only good that comes out of the family is her son's illegmate daughter (Shannon Wherry) who has token care of granny most of her life and is supposed to be sole heir to Granny's estate. Well one day, Granny recieves a potion that will give her eternal life, if she and the potion stay out of the sun though. Well guess what, it gets exposed to the sun and granny dies. However she comes back to life as a homicidal, ax swinging demon.
Instead of trying to be your standard, routine slice and dice horror film this feature just goes all out sparing nothing in the process. Stella Stevens is in great form and has some of the funniest one liners in recent memory and Shannon has never been more appealing. The death scenes are possibly some of the most creative and violent in horror film history and the ending is a knockout, especially the dinner table scene with the whole family gathered including dad. Much better then you would expect.
Rated R; Extreme Graphic Violence, Nudity, Profanity, and Sexual Situations. -
KSNeat27 April 2002This is the worst movie I have ever seen, but it made me laugh more than most of the hit comedies coming out of hollywood these days. In fact, I've rented it more than once to share with my lucky friends. You just don't know what you are missing if you haven't seen The Granny!
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although I will have to admit that "The Granny" was one of the worst films that I have ever seen, I always like to find something positive to say about most things. Unfortunately, there's not much I can say about this movie that would be considered positive. It was cheesy, to say the least. The dialogue was non-existent (I actually think the movie would have been better as a silent flick). The plot was so thin, it was like watching a really bad mentos commercial on acid. Of course, there is one positive thing I can say about the film. Although most of the cast of the film should give up acting (if they can even call what they did in that film acting), there were two actors that made the film bearable. Not surprisingly, it was the two youngest actors of the film. Samantha Hendricks played her part well, since all she had to do was be herself; a little girl in a freaky situation. Ryan Bollman, while a little overly dramatic in his role, shows true acting talent. These two actors would do best to hold out for more decent parts, and not waste their talent on such low-grade "film making". "The Granny" belongs in the waste basket, but save these two actors. I hate seeing talent go to waste.
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This is the 2nd worst movie made.I have never seen a movie with such a stupid plot or bad as actors.This movie was just simply dumb.don't buy this movie ever or rent it.If you do you will never watch this movie again.And it had the worst graphics of all!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! do not watch this movie.
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BO-3414 October 2000I went to the video shop to rent a really cheesy horror flick, and boy did I get one. The Granny caught my attention because it stars one-time beauty and decent actress Stella Stevens, and looked like it might be fun. Alas, Stevens is barely recognizable, and the show is not only not fun, it is agonizing to watch. I rate it -**, and recommend it as a candidate for worst movie ever made.