If you take it for what it is,a feast of camp,then this movie (and particularly Lange) is much fun to watch.Probably influenced by Davis's (see "hush hush sweet Charlotte") and Crawford's end of career ( see "straitjacket"),Jessica Lange gives an over the top performance of the bitchiest mother-in-law you can think of.Always a beaming smile on her face even when she 's at her most sadistic.Her bubble head son seems not to have overcome his Oedipus complex;when at the turning of the year,"Auld lang syne" is played,he dances with his mom.As for the wedding ,he seems to marry her. Besides,being able to lead a normal life

after what we learned from his "education" is hard to believe ;a boy like him would have normally ended up like cousin Sebastian in "Suddenly last Summer".

This extravaganza has also intellectual pretensions:in the church ,Martha keeps on reciting her act of contrition while quoting the Ruth Book in the Bible;in her troubled mind ,her unfortunate daughter-in-law becomes Ruth ,whose affection to mother-in-law Naomi reflects her own situation.

If you're not a highbrow,and if you like old-fashioned cheesy melodramas "Hush" is made for you.If you're a "pulp fiction" fan,well,please pass by.

This stands out as a camp classic of the Joseph H. Lewis variety: there's even a threatening gadget, in this case a steam cabinet. Don't go into this expecting a deep movie and you'll have a lot of fun with the deliberately over-the-top characterizations

Yeah, this is a late entry in that psycho-thriller sub-genre of the early 1990s, and the second you discover that the film sat on the shelf for two years before release you know it's going to be a stinker. When actress Jessica Lange herself described it in less than complimentary terms the instinct is to hurl it onto the fire and get as far away as possible.

Nevertheless, I sat through this in its entirety, glutton for punishment as I am. And it's a weak thriller for sure, in which the thrills are non-existent and the plot is even more laboured than Gwyneth Paltrow's character. Basically, she meets and falls for the perfect guy, falls pregnant and marries him, only to discover that her new mother-in-law holds more than a few dark secrets and is already obsessed with the unborn child.

The feel of the movie has more in common with a lukewarm TV movie of the era than a theatrical film and indeed there's very little of interest here. Most of the film relies on acting from a very average Paltrow to get by, and her protagonist is hardly a sympathetic one. Lange is better, channelling some of the energy of the grand old matriarch psychos (think Joan Crawford in WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?),but her performance alone does not a good film make.