This is a known scene stealer. If she’d been in The Seven Seals, Death would have lost his entire wardrobe.
Post-Throw Momma from the Train (1987) I was bemused. This story about two evil women bedeviling innocent Professor Donner and his student, Owen Lift, and the men’s escapades in trying to rid themselves of their female counterparts seemed to be the lightest of fluff, and yet I found it easy to keep on watching. This is abnormal for me, as my taste in fluff does tend to be a trifle eclectic. Think The Video Dead.
I think, perhaps, it was the dynamic between Owen and his ever abusive mother, a mother who may have supped so strongly upon the stew of the traditional high hopes of a mother for her son that it had turned her emotionally inside-out, until his ever apparent inadequacies, physical and mental, have reduced her to a quivering screaming hulk of a woman. Demanding every service from her son (and I’ll just say AUGH! here), and finding them continually defective, he is now smothering under her demands for his improvement until he’s ready to … to …
Well, perhaps throwing Momma from the train might be a bit much for him, but when it seems she’s a better wordsmith than Professor Donner, that’s it. In the resulting fracas, Owen finds his inner goodness, and his mother, who just possibly maybe might have underhandedly planned this entire episode in a last ditch effort to get her son over the hump, finally finds good in her son.
And the Professor? His wife returns from the dead and, as one might expect from such a creature, becomes his muse, in a way, perhaps a zombie muse if we’re feeling expansive, resulting in a pop-up near disaster for him and his mental health.
And if you can’t decide if you’d like to see this movie from this review, you’re probably the wiser for it. The only other advice I can suggest is to watch it with a head cold, like I may have done.
