“Crazy Fat Ethel” and the Joke’s on Us
Criminally Insane is one of those movies that thinks being mean-spirited automatically makes it edgy. It doesn’t. It just makes it a slog. Sold under the alternate title Crazy Fat Ethel, this 61-minute “horror” film manages to feel twice as long, which is honestly its most impressive achievement. It wants to be a shocking grindhouse gut-punch about a violent, food-obsessed killer just out of an institution. What it actually delivers is a glacially paced chamber piece about a woman, some cold cuts, and the slow death of the audience’s patience.
Horror, But Make It Anti-Charisma
Ethel Janowski, played by Priscilla Alden, is a morbidly obese woman released from a mental institution into her grandmother’s care. She’s furious, hungry, and convinced she was starved in the hospital. The film’s entire personality is basically: “Isn’t it wild that a fat woman kills people because she wants to keep eating?” That’s the joke. That’s the angle. That’s… it.
Alden actually tries to give Ethel some presence, swinging between sulking, shrieking, and dead-eyed murder, but the script treats her less like a character and more like a punchline with a pulse. The movie doesn’t explore trauma, mental illness, or systemic failure—it just stares at its lead with a sneer and calls it commentary.
The Grandmother, the Fridge, and the Knife
The first major “shock” comes when Grandma Janowski, rightly horrified by Ethel’s nonstop gorging, empties the fridge and locks the cabinets. Instead of, say, trying therapy, communication, or literally anything else, the movie rockets straight to Ethel stabbing her to death. There’s a moment where she stabs the grandmother’s hand just to pry loose the key she died clutching, and you can almost hear the director offscreen going, “This is twisted, right? This is wild?”
It’s not. It’s just flat. The scene has all the energy of someone slowly cutting a cake, only less emotionally engaging. The only real tension is whether the film will ever remember to turn on a light.
Grocery Delivery: Now With Homicide
The murder of the delivery boy might be the most honest scene in the movie: a young guy brings food, Ethel can’t pay, he tries to leave, and she kills him with a broken bottle rather than give up the groceries. It’s grim, sure, but it’s also the closest the film comes to embracing its own absurdity.
Unfortunately, the directing and editing are so sluggish that even this moment feels like it’s happening underwater. What should be a shocking, darkly comic escalation plays like a rehearsal the crew decided was “good enough.” If you’re going to make a movie about a woman who literally kills for groceries, the bare minimum is that the kills should feel dangerous or unnerving. Here, they just feel like line items.
Rotten Corpses, Rotten Pacing
Once Grandma and the delivery boy are dead, Criminally Insane settles into its true form: a low-budget “rotting in the living room” drama with occasional stabbings. Ethel stuffs bodies into a locked bedroom, the smell grows unbearable, and her sister Rosalie shows up, complaining about the stench between sex sessions with her abusive ex-boyfriend, John.
This should be suspenseful: bodies decaying, neighbors nearby, cops sniffing around, time running out. Instead, the movie wastes huge chunks on people wandering through the same hallway, repeating the same complaints about the smell, as if the script itself got trapped in that bedroom with the corpses. It’s like watching a stage play where everyone forgot their lines and decided to improvise “vaguely irritated” for an hour.
The Doctor Will Not See You Now
Dr. Gerard, the one man who might have prevented all this, shows up just long enough to get bludgeoned with a candlestick. That’s his arc. He doubts she should be released, she’s released anyway, she kills him. The film keeps bringing authority figures to Ethel’s door—doctor, detective—and then doing absolutely nothing interesting with them.
Detective Sergeant McDonough, played by George Buck Flower, at least has a little personality: a sort of weary cop shambling through the script, asking basic questions while Ethel lies badly and contradicts herself. He seems suspicious, then leaves, then comes back, then leaves again. By the time he finally walks in on her eating her grandmother’s arm, it feels less like detective work and more like someone finally checking to see if the movie is nearly over.
Murder as Meal Prep
The late stretch of the film should be peak chaos: multiple bodies, rotting stench, neighbors on edge, Ethel dismembering corpses and stuffing them into sacks, trying to dump them in the ocean. In a better movie, this would be macabre, frenzied, even bleakly funny.
Here, it’s just slow. We watch Ethel drag bags, struggle with logistics, drive around, get thwarted by the existence of other humans, and trudge back inside. Her biggest mistake isn’t leaving the trunk open with a severed hand inside; it’s assuming anyone wants to watch this in real time. The suspicious neighbor peeking into the trunk and discovering the hand should be a jolting moment. Instead, it plays like a punchline to a joke the film forgot to set up properly.
And then there’s the final image: Ethel caught mid-meal, chowing down on Grandma’s arm. It’s clearly meant to be the ultimate “Can you believe we went there?” taboo-breaking shot. But by then, the movie’s so repetitive and flat that you just feel mildly gross and very tired. The intended effect is “shocking nihilism.” The actual effect is “office microwave after someone reheated fish.”
Laughing At, Never With
The biggest problem with Criminally Insane isn’t that it’s offensive; plenty of horror films are. It’s that it’s offensive andlazy. It targets Ethel’s body size and mental illness as its core “joke,” returning to the same cheap beats again and again: she’s hungry, she’s unstable, she kills. Rinse, repeat, drag another corpse. There’s no real insight, no escalation in theme, no twisted empathy—just a constant low-level sneer.
Dark humor works when we’re laughing at our own fears, hypocrisies, and systems. Here, we’re just watching a woman get turned into a grotesque cartoon so the movie can pat itself on the back for “going too far.” It wants the credit of transgression without the effort of actually saying anything.
Final Diagnosis: Light on Runtime, Heavy on Nothing
At 61 minutes, Criminally Insane should be a quick, nasty little shocker. Instead, it’s a plodding, repetitive grind that takes one-note cruelty and stretches it paper-thin. The performances are stranded, the direction is flat, and the script is basically a list of murders with snack breaks in between.
There’s a version of this story that could have been a brutal, pitch-black character study of isolation, hunger (literal and emotional), and systemic neglect. This is not that version. This is the version where you watch a woman kill everyone in her orbit, hide the bodies badly, and somehow still feel like nothing really happened.
If this movie were a meal, it’d be half-thawed TV dinner left in the oven too long: bland, rubbery, faintly disgusting, and absolutely not worth the trouble.
