Forget Blair Witch or the flavor of the month at the nearest artsy film festival. This is the definition of Independent. Shot on a shoestring in Muscatine, IA, this semi-sequel to The Bad Seed (Mommy is never named, but the parallel is obvious) is a character-driven study of a young girl discovering her perfect mother is just plain evil. The casting is clever, especially scream queen Brinke Stevens doing an about face as Mommy's "Plain-Jane" sister Beth. I highly recommend Max's novelisation, which fleshes out the back story. Also look for Max and his band playing at the dance.
Reviews
2 Reviews
Die, Monster, Die!
(1965)
Will anyone ever do Lovecraft right?
14 May 2000
Just caught it on AMC, and my question is, after 30 years of valiant (and not-so-valiant attempts) will anyone ever be able to do a real Lovecraft movie? The main problem seems to be that most of the Lovecraft stories are just vignettes, heavy on narration, light on action. (The Night Gallery episode "Pickman's Model" probably comes closest to the format) While ReAnimator is terrific, it relies heavily on humor, which is mostly absent from Lovecraft's prose. The main problem with Die Monster Die is that coming from the Corman Camp, it tries to hard to Poe-ify the source material and it becomes just another crazy-old-man-hiding-a-secret-in-the-old-dark-house story. Karloff gives a good performance, but you can see how badly his health was affecting him by the time this was filmed. All in all, it could be worse. (see '87's The Curse, and its non-sequels for evidence)
Tell Your Friends