mark.waltz 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!"

Wizard-8 As you probably know, Bette Davis walked off of "Wicked Stepmother" after just a week of filming, leaving writer/director Larry Cohen scrambling to rewrite his script and get the movie completed. While the end results make sense (sort of), what is really amazing is that Cohen not only managed to sell the completed movie to a major Hollywood studio, he made enough on the sale to make a profit. The movie simply isn't good, which is probably why the Hollywood studio barely released it to theaters. In her footage, Bette Davis not only looks and sounds extremely ill, she doesn't seem to give a darn about this project. The other actors come across somewhat better, but even they aren't able to generate laughs at any point in the movie. The screenplay they are stuck with simply isn't funny at all. The heavily rewritted screenplay also (perhaps inevitably) feels like Cohen is making things up as he goes along. It also doesn't help that the special effects are mostly pretty cheesy, even for an 1980s film. In short, the movie is a low point for Davis, Cohen, studio Metro Goldwyn Mayer, and everybody else involved with it.

midge56 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.

Kai-18 This film has an Ugh factor that's a 10 out of 10. It may think it's a comedy but it's in no way funny. It's depressing and boring and stupid and I don't even know what the director was thinking. Any episode of Bewitched is much better and much smarter than this (and I don't really like Bewitched).