User Reviews

Throughout her career, Bette Davis didn't really show up in any movies that are just plain horrible. After all, she's one of the most acclaimed actresses of the golden age of movies. Unfortunately, this is the one we're stuck with as her final film role, and my god is it horrendous. I'd rather pull crocodile teeth out of my eyelid than rewatch this. The reasons why it is so bad are multitudinous. First, I'll explain the storyline because that's only the icing on the putrid cake. It follows a witch named Miranda (Bette Davis) who marries Sam, a father of a daughter named Jenny. Jenny is married to Steve Fisher, and after coming home from vacation, they discover Miranda has loaded the fridge with meat, much to the distress of Jenny (she's a vegetarian). Later, we are shown how Miranda has a daughter of her own named Priscilla. At one point, it suddenly occurs to Jenny that Priscilla and her mother are never encountered together, raising some questions about whether or not they're actually the same person. Some time after, we are told they are never seen together because one must live in the body of a cat while the other remains in human form. They switch periodically but only one can be the human at any given time. Jenny later discovers this and confronts Priscilla after the inside of her house has been wrecked by the witches. Eventually, Priscilla is defeated because she doesn't let Miranda come out of the cat's body to assist her, and Jenny's family is saved. This movie is pure garbage, I'm truly stunned. There's things like Reefer Madness and Plan 9 From Outer Space that are so laughably terrible that they're amusing and even pretty hilarious to witness, but this is way, way below that. This is the bottom of the barrel of what can actually be considered a movie, and when you consider this was Davis' last film, it is a truly despicable excuse for entertainment. With her last performance, she should have been in something amazing, but it didn't work out that way. This movie was such an atrocious mess that it cost about 2 and a half million dollars to make, but only got back about 44,000 at the box office. A profit worth a pathetic 2 percent of the original budget. Clearly, nobody likes this movie. How could this have passed? Terrible actors (except Davis) that speak in the same bland, monotone voice the entire time, a ridiculous plot, an annoying game show towards the end, etc. It's a disaster. I can't think of any reason whatsoever to recommend this movie. Even Davis fans should stay away. It is garbage in all respects. Strangely enough, TCM sometimes plays it, the only reason being that it was Davis' last movie. If you for whatever baffling reason still want to see it, you could probably find it on there, but just one warning: you will not be happy.

WICKED STEPMOTHER is the kind of movie that happens to an actor who cannot understand that his or her time has passed, and that encroaching illness and the approximation of death should be an indicative that maybe it would be best to relax and enjoy the accolades, retrospectives, and lifetime achievement awards.

Bette Davis was coming off the mild success of THE WHALES OF AUGUST when she decided to do this movie about a witch who moves into a family's home and causes havoc there. Severely ill, barely able to remember her lines, and frail as a leaf about to fall from its branch in the middle of fall, she was forced to step out of filming only a week after production on the movie began.

Surprisingly enough, she claimed problems with the script among other things, making it clear that old age and illness had not mellowed her character one bit. What she seemed unable to understand that this sort of demands which she had been known for back in her prime was supremely out of style by now, and for an actress of her stature to assume she could throw her ego around just because, was pushing it a little.

Hence, her scenes remain in this movie and should have probably been either deleted and replaced with another actress. I can only assume that the director did not have the money to replace Davis, and decided to keep her character and have Barbara Carrera step in, adding a ludicrous set-up that would explain Davis' absence from the movie. As it is, WICKED STEPMOTHER remains as Bette Davis' last film, one that can be bypassed as an gargantuan error on her behalf.

Did you know that Larry Cohen wrote, produced and directed the last film Bette Davis was ever in? No? Well, she dropped out after filming began, citing issues with the script and how she was being photographed, but Cohen claims that it was due to her ill health. Regardless, the results are...interesting.

Davis plays the title villain, a chain-smoking witch (Becca sees her as the hero of the story) who marries Sam (Lionel Stander, Max from Hart to Hart) while his vegetarian family - daughter Jenny (Colleen Camp, the maid from Clue) and husband Steve (David Rasche from Sledge Hammer!) - are on vacation.

When Davis left the film, her character becomes a cat and her daughter Priscilla (Barbara Carrera, Never Say Never Again, Condorman) takes over as the film's villain. She mostly argues with her other about switching bodies and sleeping with Steve.

People get shrunk, Tom Bosley, Seymour Cassel and Richard Moll (remember, all 80's horror and science fiction must have either him or Robert England in it) show up and there's a crazy moment where Jenny discusses how much she misses her mother and they show a photo of Joan Crawford!

This is...well, it's weird. You can tell the movie fell apart when Davis left days into filming for a dentist visit and never came back. Her ADR was all done by Michael Greer (Thorn from Messiah of Evil!), who was an accomplished female impersonator. What a strange film!

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!"

Director Larry Cohen's best work, The Wicked Stepmother" may also be actor David Rasche's best film role. However, Bette Davis ruins the show. She is not terrific as Miranda the witch; the famous actress is clearly ill and out-of-place. This is not "The Whales of August"; it is naff comedy with inexorable inside jokes.

Richard Moll shines in his scenes, especially with Colleen Camp, who essentially carries the film.

This might have been a lovely made-for-television movie. I am bit surprised it had theatrical release. The film does have good, strong production values and Larry Cohen never did another film this good.

This is an entertaining late night movie when you are too tired to think deeply about a film.

I do have to say it was a little strange. I was disappointed when Bette Davis never appeared in the movie, but after reading some of the comments from reviews from other viewers, I understood why she suddenly disappeared. The actress who took her place was great.

I got a kick out of this movie. It is a campy comedy satire. These other reviews are out of line. They are inappropriately trying to compare Mad Magazine to Shakespeare. Mad Magazine is enjoyably humorous entertainment but is in a completely different category than Shakespeare.

This movie is cute and funny like one of Leslie Nielson's comedies. It is a low budget film but has a campy appeal and a lot of cute humor. This film also has a notable cast. It not only has Bette Davis, but it also has the glamorous Barbara Carrera (of James Bond film fame and costarred with JR Ewing on Dallas) and Evelyn Keyes (Scarlett O'Hara's sister Sue Ellen on Gone with the Wind) and Tom Bosley.

These reviewers seem to think Bette was blindsided by some evil director. Bette read the script before she decided to do the movie. She had plenty of experience on how to turn down films. She was emaciated from cancer and at extreme age and hampered by lingering problems from strokes. It was quite obvious that she was dying from cancer. Her film options were limited at this point. She knew this when she accepted the role but her expectations were also unrealistic.

She loved acting in films and this was the only offer she had at the time. She was a great actress and had been treated as Hollywood Royalty. But Bette didn't understand that you can't walk into Motel 6 and expect to find the Waldorf. She was accustomed to great directors, great producers, professional crews and high budget productions and set herself up for disappointment by expecting the same levels of professionalism from low budget productions. Thus, when her expectations were not met, she left the production which placed undue hardship on them since she had not completed filming her role. Our reviewers are also forgetting that you can't compare a low budget campy film to a production like Jezebel. These are unrealistic expectations and unfair to the movie.

Her expectations of the highest levels of professionalism in film had always created the potential for conflict and disappointment for her during her career when film productions which did not measure up to those standards which included her expectations of the attitudes and behaviors of other members of the cast, crews, directors, producers, etc. Bette was offended by unprofessionalism. However, like the reviewers who made hateful comments about this movie, she had similar unrealistic expectations.

I'm glad the director was able to salvage Bette's performance by reworking the movie. I'm sure it would have been much better in quality if he had a better budget and didn't have to work around Bette's unfinished filming. There was room for improvement, but I still enjoyed it. It was cute and it gave us an opportunity to see some of Bette's final scenes of acting. It was a window into the latter moments of her life.

There is some bad acting in this film by Colleen Camp who played the daughter. Her acting was grossly overdone with downright absurd hand gestures and bizarre, loud, obnoxious overacting. It reminded me of Jim Carey's bizarre physical antics, gestures and facial expressions with nonsensical overacting. Colleen was the one who ruined this movie and her bad acting looks deliberate. If you watch closely, you can see how she went out of her way to overpower and ruin the scenes and lines for other actors. Watch what she does while other actors are trying to say their lines. She purposely tries to ruin the scene and drown out the other actors. No one could be that bad by accident with the exception of Richard Moll (also in this movie). If the two of them had been recast, it would have been an immense improvement. Just about anyone could have done better. That is my only complaint with the director, that he did not fire Camp and Moll. But at least Moll did not try to deliberately destroy the scenes of other actors like Colleen. He only ruined his own scenes, which could easily be edited out.

As for the writer... he couldn't make up his mind whether Priscilla and Miranda were the same person or two separate entities. It kept changing back and forth and you have to wonder if there was any sobriety while he was writing that dialogue. This could have easily been fixed. In fact, with a little creative editing, these dialogue errors as well as Colleen and Molls bad acting could be edited, cleaned up and trimmed down to reduce the damage they did. A little creative editing and CGI effects could fix all of the problems and then re-release it.

As long as you don't have unrealistic expectations and understand this is a low budget satire which had to salvage the movie from a partial, incomplete filming of her role, it is actually an entertaining movie. "Low Budget" is often misused as a dirty word in movies but it is not the fault of the director or cast that they were unable to obtain better funding. It does not mean it is a bad movie. It only refers to what they were able to afford in sets, actors and equipment where the story might be quite good.

This is a cute movie which is no worse than Chevy Chase's movie "Modern Problems" or Goldie Hawn's movies or John Ritter's movies or Tom Hanks in "The Money Pit," etc. Those were all satires which did not have high budgets. Comedies rarely get high budgets. So, if you like campy satires and don't have an HUA problem, you might enjoy this cute and campy film. I know I did.