No Good Very Bad Movies 24: The one by Mr. BIG where nothing's big

 

Title: Picture Mommy Dead aka Color Mommy Dead

What Year?: 1966

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity/ Prototype

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/3)

 

With this review, I’m continuing a survey of very odd films by famous or infamous filmmakers, which might go on quite a bit longer than I planned. The funny thing is, very few of the entries under consideration have been in the latter category, either in terms of the film or the filmmaker. With the present film, I have the exception to prove the rule, a film by an especially notorious filmmaker who ended up with his own nickname, based on somewhat skewed perceptions of his work. The present selection is the movie that broke the mold, and as we will see, it’s up for debate if that was a good thing. I present Color Mommy Dead, a movie by the infamous Bert I. Gordon aka Mr. BIG, and as noted, there’s nothing about giant bugs.

Our story begins with the image of an evidently deceased woman in tacky/ expensive clothes consumed by a fire, just as someone takes a beautiful necklace off her body. After the mindboggling credits, we meet the survivors of the deceased, her husband, his new wife, formerly the governess, and their daughter Susan, a young lady of ambiguous age and even less certain mental maturity just returning home from a convent/ mental institution. Naturally, the girl is the only witness to her mother’s demise, but professes very convenient amnesia about the whole evening. In short order, we meet more rogues, particularly a cousin injured in the fire who speaks at length about the size of Susan’s trust fund. The girl becomes increasingly disturbed by the once-familiar surroundings, even wondering if she killed her mother. Meanwhile, the rest of the household spin their schemes, variously for lust, money, and the still-missing necklace. But Susan remains the wild card as history repeats itself, and even this pack of never-do-wells are unprepared for a girl with no agenda except being daddy’s girl!

Picture Mommy Dead was a 1966 drama/ psychological horror film directed by Bert I. Gordon (see Empire of the Ants), possibly the first of his films to be both adult-oriented and outside the science fiction/ fantasy genres. The film starred Gordon’s real-life daughter Susan Gordon, a child actress known for roles on The Twilight Zone and several of his earlier fantasy and adventure films, with Don Ameche as the father, Martha Hyer as the stepmother Francene and Maxwell Reed as the cousin Anthony.  Hedy Lamar was originally cast as the mother Jessica, but replaced by Zsa Zsa Gabor during filming. The film was made on a relatively high budget of $1M, compared to an estimated $15,000 budget of Gordon’s debut feature King Dinosaur. A novelization was written by the film’s screenwriter, Robert Sherman. Susan Gordon withdrew from acting following the release of the film, several months after her 17^th birthday. The elder Gordon continued his attempts at “mainstream” work with the 1970 sex comedy (!) How To Succeed With Sex, before returning to genre films with movies like Food of the Gods. The film has been released on home video, most recently by Kino Lorber in 2020. It is not available in digital format. Susan Gordon died in 2011; she is survived by her father and 6 children.

For my experiences, I first became aware of Bert I. Gordon at second-hand from books like The Golden Turkey Awards, where the repeated running gag was that all his films had something to do with animals or people being grown to giant size or shrunk to miniature. I finally looked into his broader filmography for the Space 1979 “Wells-A-Thon”, where several of his works fell under consideration. I was immediately intrigued to find that his output wasn’t quite as stereotyped as the jokes would have it, and knew that sooner or later, I would come back to it. Ultimately, what got this one in the lineup was that it proved to be the easiest to obtain. (By comparison, the sex comedy seems to be literally wiped off the face of the Earth…) I ordered it with some other items a few weeks before this review, and made space for it as the director lineup evolved. I watched it and started the present review in good time, and boy, is it 1960s.

Moving forward, the central reality of this film is that it feels oddly out of time, enough that I was very tempted to apply the Anachronistic Outlier label. At face value, it’s a startlingly late example of the whodunit, a genre that had already devolved to the point that the most significant examples were parodies like A Shot In The Dark. What stands out more, however, are the surreal visuals which would be easily be discounted as cliches 10 or even 5 years later but here can be granted as innovative. The question remains, of course, whether the mix of new and old elements is done well, and my answer is a qualified yes. The characters and their intrigues are seedy enough to call to mind the more sophisticated “noir” mysteries like Rebecca and Maltese Falcon, complete with several impressive double crosses that winnow the field before the finale. On the other side, the jarring imagery and choppy editing intended to convey Susan’s iffy mental state are at least not tiresome in the way they would become later, with some very good moments like the destruction of a painting and the truly random appearance of a falcon. The one thing that arguably gets in the way is the garish décor of the house. It’s so extreme and flat-out hideous that it could easily be taken as a satire of the fads of the day. In my judgment, however, it’s just as likely that the B-movie veteran and his crew were still working out color photography.

Meanwhile, the center of the movie is Ms. Gordon and her character, and this is where things get shaky. There would be an easy rant about the casting by the elder Gordon, yet the real problem is that the story never quite decides where to go. The actress definitely looks even younger than she would have been in real life, which can get uncomfortable in its own right, but without more specific comments about the character’s age, it’s very hard to judge whether she is ahead, behind or on a completely different track from where she should be. The deeper problem is that there’s nothing to create doubt about her place in the story. It’s only a very mild spoiler to say she is not responsible for any of the murders, and that leaves one or two real suspects. (I could go into a whole other rant about the very selective fire damage.) That in turn makes the whole focus on her a matter of the premise dictating the story rather than evolving with it. It’s only in the finale that the film progresses past gimmickry, as Susan’s revealed actions and character prove as unnerving as those of the actual killers. Indeed, this would be even more uncomfortable without the ambiguity regarding Susan’s development, which ultimately furthers the subversion of childhood “innocence”.

That leaves the “one scene”, and I really had a lot more to work with than I would have expected. There was one particular sequence, however, that I kept coming back to simply as a frame of reference to make sense of the story, the movie and whatever the elder Gordon was trying to do. After her return to the house and a long series of talks with the adults, Susan returns to her bedroom and her toys, so of course I looked into this. Most of the playthings are generic enough that they don’t clarify or clash with the timeframe before or since, like a clown and a sort of goofy/ creepy wolf. A couple seem specific to the ‘60s era, what looks like a large version of a Troll doll and a hippie-themed doll that matches one called Scooba-Doo made by Mattel in 1964. It’s not entirely clear how many of the toys are really familiar or introduced to make her homecoming happier, but she clearly finds them comforting, especially the hippie doll (which is going to show a much larger vocabulary before the end). The camera reflects her calm with clear and affectionate shots, until the voices of the adults start to echo in her head. From there, it’s choppy cam as the toys get increasingly disconcerting closeups, culminating in a scream. Then we are back with the girl, still holding the doll, with no adult coming to attend to her if the cry was real at all. This is surrealism that actually works, in no small part because it’s frame in the “real” world, and enough to buy my goodwill.

In closing, the one thing I have left to say is that, having viewed a fair sampling of Bert I. Gordon’s work, this one is the best by a wide margin, though dear Logos, that’s probably even less of a compliment than it sounds. It was probably never going to set a new direction for Mr. BIG’s career, but it proved for all time that he could do something different and new to boot, even if none of his critics or fans were paying attention. If it comes to that, one can just about see how the detour outside the genre ghetto marginally improved his later work. At the same time, the film embodies his unaccountable ability to stir up a measure of affection against one’s better judgment. Heck, it’s left me feeling generous enough to keep looking for the sex comedy. Yeah, it's out there. And with that, feel free to go to bed, possibly praying whoever finds it brings a flamethrower. It's a dry heat…