Brand new factory sealed Shelley Winters double feature is Out Of Print (OOP) and no longer being manufactured.

Among the most pleasing of flipper disc double features this pair of horror-nostalgia melodramas made by director Curtis Harrington, afforded Shelley Winters a shot at Guignol stardom.

WHAT's the MATTER WITH HELEN? Spinning off from the Leoplod and Loeb case, the premise is that the mothers of a pair of 1930s psycho killers set themselves up in new identities to escape a vengeful prank-caller and open a Hollywood training school for Shirley Temple wannabes.

The vivacious Adelle (Debbie Reynolds) throws herself into their new life and is wooed by a Texas millionaire (Dennis Weaver), while the religious Helen (Shelley Winters) suffers hysterical episodes and reacts to imagined or real persecutions with knife-wielding violence.

At the heart of the story is a complex co-dependent relationship between the women, both of whom are stranger than they seem. Reynolds flirts with personal revelation as the glamorous mama who has neglected her weakling son and relishes a chance to strut her stuff in a hideous "kiddystar revue", while Winters gives perhaps the performance of a lifetime as the religious, rabbit-petting lump given to panic attacks, casual atrocities and the most repressed lesbian crush ever depicted in the movies.

The film fan director also relishes the letter-perfect period gossip, the satire of ghastly stage mothers (Yvette Vickers) and horrid moppets, staging one pre-teen Mae West imitation that is probably more disturbing than all the film's slasher murders. Agness Moorehead, a hag movie perennial, has a meaty bit part as a hatchet-faced radio evangelist who doesn't provide the answers Helen is seeking and indirectly leads to the grotesque final act.

WHOEVER SLEW AUNTIE ROO? This updated version of Hansel & Gretel is set in about the 1920s in a Christmas card Britain, it commences with the batty old Rosie (Winters), affectionatley known as Auntie Roo, who keeps the skeleton of her dead daughter in a coffin in her huge, cavernous mansion. Gradually, the movie shifts to the point-of-view of the two orphans she takes under her wing.

However, the relationship between Roo and the youngsters is handled well, her kindness to the somewhat sinsisterly gullible children being tinged with deeply neurotic overtones to prepare the ground for the changeover to the horrid ogre imagined by the little boy.

The orphans discover in the attic the proffesional equipment of Roo's late husband, a stage magician, to which is added an even more arbitrary sequence in which a servant terrifies them by pretending to be a ghost. Events begin to be seen primarily through the little boy's eyes making Auntie an increasingly menacing figure until she is locked in a cupboard by the children who then set fire to it and leave, taking the 'treasure', her jewels with them.