Picture Mommy Dead

There was a lot of schlocky horror and sci-fi in the 1950s and 1960s. Recently, I had the chance to watch one such film, Picture Mommy Dead.

The movie starts off with a prologue scene of Jessica Shelley (Zsa Zsa Gabor) burning to death, and her daughter Susan (Susan Gordon) singing that song about "the worms go in, the worms go out". Cut to a convent school that apparently doubles as a sanatorium for troubled youth. Susan wound up there due to the trauma of seeing her mother die the way she did. But after several years, she's apparently ready to go back to the outside world, and her father Edward (Don Ameche) is picking her up from Sister René (Signe Hasso in a one-scene part).

In a bizarre move, Dad takes Susan back to the home she grew up in, which just happens to be the home where Mom died, something you'd think would be a traumatic experience. But that's not the only bizarre thing. While Susan was in the sanatorium, Dad remarried, to Francene (Martha Hyer), who just happened to be Susan's governess while Jessica was still alive. The family lawyer Clayborn (Wendell Corey in another one-scene part) discusses the will with the family, since Susan would have been too young to comprehend everything. Mom left most of the fortune to Susan in a trust that she'd only get control of once she turns 25. Mom had the wealth and Dad only had a high-society name, so Mom left Dad control of a much more modest sum of money, which Francene has already blown through.

So you can guess part of what happens next. Although Jessica's death was declared accidental by the coroner, Francene intimates that Susan was actually responsible for it, which is part of why Susan had to go into that institution. Susan starts to have nightmares as everything seems to remind her of her dead Mom and Francene seeems to be doing nothing whatsoever to discourage this, sort of like a bizarro world Z-movie version of Rebecca. It's an obvious ploy on Francene's part to get Susan committed which would give Susan and Edward control over Susan's money.

But Francene is a much bigger piece of work than that. Jessica had a cousin Anthony (Maxwell Reed) who was burned in the fire, and Francene is conspiring with him to wrest control of Susan's money not only from Susan, but from Edward as well!

While the plot of Picture Mommy Dead is lurid, the movie as a whole doesn't work, which is a bit of a shame. The problem is that the first two-thirds of the movie are too slow and tedious. The final third veers into camp, at which point the movie picks up and becomes a lot of fun. The acting goes way downhill and the nonsense goes way up, with echoes (not necessarily intentional) of such classics as Detour and Night of the Hunter. It's a mess, but laughably fun, and it's a shame that it takes the movie so long to get there.