Ruh oh, Raggy.
Two on a Guillotine is about Cassie Duquesne (Connie Stevens), the estranged daughter of a famous magician (Caesar Romero) who was famous for his dangerous and shocking tricks. When he dies, she inherits everything, despite him having given her to relatives after her mother (also Connie Stevens) disappeared twenty years earlier. Cassie has to stay in her father’s gothic mansion in order to get the money (wait, I know this story).
The press is fascinated with her which bring us to the writer character of this silly horror story. Val Henderson (Dean Jones) is a reporter pretending to be a real estate agent trying to get the inside scoop on her life. Cassie still finds his ethics questionable when he pushes to get close to her. Clearly, he works for a rag of a paper if his boss is insisting he write a story about her without her consent, essentially interviewing her off the record without her knowledge. However, Val sticks around because the house is full of tricks and booby traps that Cassie isn’t keen on investigating on her own. Despite this being a very cornball film, Cassie is a well done character. She is is innocent and empathetic without being naive or unrealistic. Val falls for her and becomes protective of her. When she starts to breakdown over the idea that her father might have actually wanted her, he realizes how people could use that to hurt her or take her money. This, naturally leads to Cassie finding out that Val is a reporter. Boy snoops on girl, boy falls for girl, boy loses girl . . . for snooping.
SPOILERS: There’s a horribly filmed nightmare sequence and Cassie decides that Val is still the only person she can trust. Of course, it turns out that her father is still alive (gasp), haunting his own house, and completely out of his mind. He accidentally murdered her mother twenty years earlier with a trick involving a guillotine. Believing Cassie to be her dead mom, he knocks her out, CHANGES HER INTO HER MOM’S STAGE COSTUME (that’s right, her father stripped and redressed his full grown daughter who he thought was his wife - gross), and sets her in the guillotine. Val runs in just in time to see the magician attempting the trick, convinced it will work this time. And it freaking does! Despite this, Cassie’s father is too far gone to realize that he almost murdered his daughter. Does Cassie get any money from her dad’s estate if he’s in the loony bin? Will she find a good therapist in the 1960s? Does Val actually put any of this into his article? Who knows. The film ends with a close up of a rabbit.
