A 50+ film career consisting of such classics as "Of Human Bondage", "The Petrified Forest", "Jezebel", "Dark Victory", "The Letter", "The Little Foxes", "Now Voyager", etc., ending with a piece of garbage like this where she walks out yet the footage she has is utilized anyway and bad plotting becomes a huge joke. Bette Davis didn't suffer as a result of this; She had passed away over a year after walking out on it, and using that to strum together a poor excuse for a full length movie, producer/director Larry Cohen sent it out to "test audiences". It never had an official big screen release, so it ended up going to home video where at the video store customers at where I worked returned it, saying that it was the most lousy piece of junk that they had ever seen. But it managed to top our rental list, just for curiosity, and probably made only a few hundred dollars for its producer whose career wasn't all that successful anyway.
The basic premise has wealthy Lionel Stander coming home one day to his greedy family and announce that he has married. In walks Bette Davis. "Call me mama", she insists, as echoes of her voice carry on in son David Rasche and daughter-in-law Colleen Camp's ears. Davis is on screen for only a few minutes, and it's a shame that the script was so lousy because the pairing of Davis and veteran actor Stander (the original "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town", "Hart to Hart") is very inspired. Rasche and Camp comment on the fact that their new stepmother is nothing like their own mother, who turns out to look exactly like Joan Crawford. The in joke may have been funny to the writers or even to audiences at the time, but 30 years later seems to be in truly bad taste, and is one of the reasons that Davis walked out on the film allegedly in the first place.
The film goes downhill from the time that Davis makes her exit, allegedly turning into the beautiful Barbara Carrerra who was brought in at the last minute. In fact, you hear an alleged conversation between Davis and Carrerra which gives the impression that Davis is a witch who has youthened herself. Or has Davis turned herself into Carrerra's cat? That is what creates the attempt at comic mystery that this bomb fails to deliver. Camp and Rasche run all over L.A. searching for their missing stepmother, and at one point, tap on the shoulder of a woman of similar height wearing the same orange bob, shocked when she turns around to find an Asian lady standing there. "She's everywhere!" they insist, as the camera glances onto one of the Hollywood side streets where a painting of the young Davis is focused onto.
Yes that is the element of the plot, and Davis never made another film, preferring to live the memory of this down in hopes of something better coming along and going on publicity and interview tours where she literally died with her greasepaint on as they say. As for the video release, well, as soon as the curiosity died off, so did the rentals, and it sat on the shelf collecting dust, with true Davis fans preferring to rent one of her classics or her last real film, "The Whales of August", which had the unfortunate displeasure of being touched by the video box that contains this catastrophe. And as for that truly awful orange wig Davis had to wear, one can only imagine her declaring, "What a Trump!"
The basic premise has wealthy Lionel Stander coming home one day to his greedy family and announce that he has married. In walks Bette Davis. "Call me mama", she insists, as echoes of her voice carry on in son David Rasche and daughter-in-law Colleen Camp's ears. Davis is on screen for only a few minutes, and it's a shame that the script was so lousy because the pairing of Davis and veteran actor Stander (the original "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town", "Hart to Hart") is very inspired. Rasche and Camp comment on the fact that their new stepmother is nothing like their own mother, who turns out to look exactly like Joan Crawford. The in joke may have been funny to the writers or even to audiences at the time, but 30 years later seems to be in truly bad taste, and is one of the reasons that Davis walked out on the film allegedly in the first place.
The film goes downhill from the time that Davis makes her exit, allegedly turning into the beautiful Barbara Carrerra who was brought in at the last minute. In fact, you hear an alleged conversation between Davis and Carrerra which gives the impression that Davis is a witch who has youthened herself. Or has Davis turned herself into Carrerra's cat? That is what creates the attempt at comic mystery that this bomb fails to deliver. Camp and Rasche run all over L.A. searching for their missing stepmother, and at one point, tap on the shoulder of a woman of similar height wearing the same orange bob, shocked when she turns around to find an Asian lady standing there. "She's everywhere!" they insist, as the camera glances onto one of the Hollywood side streets where a painting of the young Davis is focused onto.
Yes that is the element of the plot, and Davis never made another film, preferring to live the memory of this down in hopes of something better coming along and going on publicity and interview tours where she literally died with her greasepaint on as they say. As for the video release, well, as soon as the curiosity died off, so did the rentals, and it sat on the shelf collecting dust, with true Davis fans preferring to rent one of her classics or her last real film, "The Whales of August", which had the unfortunate displeasure of being touched by the video box that contains this catastrophe. And as for that truly awful orange wig Davis had to wear, one can only imagine her declaring, "What a Trump!"