DAILY CALL SHEET: JANUARY 8, 2026

Strait-Jacket (1964) Upon catching her husband in the act of adultery with another woman, Lucy goes all Old Testament and chops their heads off with an axe. Twenty years later, after she's released from the insane asylum, Lucy goes to live with her brother. There, she tries to reconnect with her daughter, whose future in-laws aren't too happy a murderess' daughter is joining their family. It doesn't help that Lucy's nightmares of severed heads make everyone question her release, especially once people around her start losing theirs in real life. Has Lucy relapsed into her old habits, or is a new axe-wielding maniac on the loose? After What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? kicked off the hagsploitation genre, it didn't take William Castle long to take a stab at it. Of course, Castle's effort is on a much less grand scale, but everyone's favorite psycho-biddy, Joan Crawford, classes things up just fine.

TIL: The ancient Jews were a kinship-based society, so adultery was a big deal in that it undermined the foundational institution of marriage, threatening a family's lineage and inheritance. In a sense, adultery murders families, so under the eye-for-an-eye justice system in place at the time, the death penalty was an appropriate punishment for such a transgression. There was also a holiness aspect to adultery laws, as marriage was believed to be a mirror image of Israel's covenant with God. So, you weren't just cheating on your spouse, but God as well. The Church believes that Jesus further elevated the institution of marriage to a sacrament signifying the union of Christ and the Church. Fortunately for adulterers, Jesus was also big on redemption, so he did away with the death penalty for the action, as evidenced by his preventing the stoning of an adulterer in the gospels.

Agent for H.A.R.M. (1966) When Soviet scientist Dr. Jan Steffanic, inventor of a new weapon that fires flesh-eating spores, defects to the United States, he and his niece are placed in protective custody by H.A.R.M., aka the Human Aetiological Relations Machine, whatever that's supposed to mean. (We'll get to that in a minute.) Anyway, H.A.R.M. assigns their best agent, Adam Chance, to hang out at a beach house with the good doctor. Naturally, Russia still wants the spores to destroy America, so communist spies inevitably show up. Despite adopting all the tropes its budget will allow, this is about as blandly generic as Bond ripoffs get, with little to offer fans of the genre except for maybe Barbara Bouchet, who did get to play Moneypenny in the comedy version of Casino Royale, but deserved to be a real Bond girl rather than being stuck in this. 

TIL: To save you from having to look it up, aetiology (or etiology if you're not British) refers to any study of causes, causation, or causality, as in philosophy, biology, or physics. In literature, a narrative is said to be etiological when it attempts to explain the origins of some custom, institution, natural phenomenon, etc. The Bible is full of such narratives, such as all the stories in Genesis of how certain people and places got their names, or the ones that detail how the various Jewish feasts originated. Some are more profound, though, as with the second creation story in Genesis, which tells how the distinction between the sexes and their complimentary unity came about because it was willed by God. Neat, huh? Now if only someone could come up with an etiological narrative explaining why a super-secret spy organization would use that word in their name, that would be great.