Die Mommie Die!

Die Mommie Die! is a comic melodrama evoking the 1960s “Grande Dame Guignol” films that featured aging stars such as Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Lana Turner. Ex-pop singer Angela Andrews is trapped in a hateful marriage with film producer Sol Sussman. Desperate to find happiness with her younger lover, an out-of-work TV actor named Tony Parker, Angela murders her husband with the aid of a poisoned suppository. In a plot that reflects Greek tragedy as well as Hollywood kitsch, Angela’s Elektra-like daughter Edith convinces Angela’s emotionally disturbed son Lance that they must avenge their father’s death by killing their mother. Lance, demanding proof of Angela’s crime, slips some LSD into her after-dinner coffee. Angela is plunged into a wild acid trip that reveals that she killed not only the children’s father but also their mother; she isn’t their mother at all, but rather their Aunt Barbara. A surprising twist ending has all of the Sussman family’s dirty laundry aired out once and for all. Angela (aka Aunt Barbara), realizing that happiness cannot be built upon a foundation of lies, turns herself in to the police.