Review of Wicked Stepmother (1989) by Nicki M — 23 Mar 2012

Kind of like watching a car crash. I was interested to see this as it was Bette Davis's final film. I was disappointed to see she's only in it for about 20 minutes (if that). I read up on it online, and it seems she was either too ill to finish it, or else she walked out due to a bad script. Either way seems plausible.

Bette is extremely frail looking here. Still glamorous, but frail for sure. The way she speaks her lines is really campy - I know she wasn't that bad an actress! That alone almost put this right up there with The Room for me.

Unfortunately Bette leaves to be replaced by her daughter, and the whole thing goes downhill. I can only assume they did some huge rewriting. I think I may actually have really liked this if Bette had stayed through the whole thing. (Don't get me wrong, it still would have been awful, but a funny awful).

The rest of the cast are pretty tragic. The daughter doing the sexy dance when she's not, the wife (although I didn't mind her) really can't act either - the grandpa was probably the better actor out of all of them, and that's saying a bit. Special effects sucked, but hey, the 80's, I could overlook that.

All considered can only really recommend this to fans of Bette (who will most likely be disappointed by the briefness of her role) or people who like really, really bad movies.