Were I feeling more generous, I might try to make the case that Larry Cohen’s Wicked Stepmother is really an allegory about societal mistreatment of the elderly – how, shirking their familial obligations, many use television as an old fogy babysitter, shuttle off their parents and grandparents to live alone, and generally ignore seniors’ needs and desires in the hope that they’ll skulk off to some dark corner and die. However, I cannot make such an argument, for Larry Cohen’s film is, in most regards, so catastrophically bad that it would be foolish to imply that something serious is going on underneath its campy surface. Notable for featuring Bette Davis’ last performance, Wicked Stepmother barely even features the legendary actress, who ditched the project early on in production (because of script concerns) and – thanks to some illogical plot modifications – was replaced by Loverboy’s Barbara Carrera. Dedicated to delivering excruciating tongue-in-cheek fantasy and hysterical overacting (by Colleen Camp and David “Sledgehammer” Rasche), the film is unusually clunky (both aesthetically and narratively) even by Cohen’s standards. But though it’s awful save for some moments of unintended comedy, there’s enough of those to keep one mildly interested, from an animatronic cat smoking cigarettes and a cannily employed Joan Crawford photo to the sound of Camp uttering the staggeringly idiotic line, “I’ve never talked dirty in Babylonian before.”
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