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  USA. 1989. Director/Screenplay – Larry Cohen, Producer – Robert Littman, Photography – Bryan England, Music – Robert Folk, Photographic Effects – Hollywood Optical Systems Inc (Supervisor – Joseph Wallikas), Stop Motion Animation – Larry Arpin, Miniatures/Makeup Effects – Mark Williams and Associates. Production Company – Larco. Cast: Barbara Carrera (Priscilla), Bette Davis (Miranda Pierpoint), Colleen Camp (Jenny Fisher), Lionel Stander (Sam), David Rasche (Steve Fisher), Richard Moll (Nathan Pringle), Tom Bosley (Lieutenant MacIntosh)  

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Plot: Steve and Jenny Fisher are shocked when they return from vacation to find that in their absence Jenny’s father has married the aging Miranda and that Miranda has started reorganizing their house and treats it as her own place. And then Miranda’s ‘daughter’ Priscilla turns up, weaving a seductive spell around the household. Jenny comes to realize that Miranda is a witch and that in fact she and Priscilla are one and the same.

In the 1970s and 80s Larry Cohen emerged as one of the most promising low-budget genre directors with the wonderfully quirky and imaginative likes of It’s Alive (1974), Demon/God Told Me To (1977), Q – The Winged Serpent (1982) and The Stuff (1985). In the 1990s though Cohen has virtually vanished as a creative force – he has not directed a film since The Ambulance (1990) and these days only turns out scripts for the likes of the Maniac Cop series, the Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct tv movies and occasional theatrical films such as Guilty as Sin (1993), Phone Booth (2002) and Cellular (2004). Cohen’s seeming retirement is a real creative loss, not to mention a mystery as one would have thought that the growth of indie film in the 1990s would have had a welcome place for him.

Perhaps some of the reason for Cohen’s disappearance might lie in Wicked Stepmother, which was his penultimate film as director. Wicked Stepmother is without any doubt Cohen’s worst film. Quirky humour runs throughout all of Cohen’s films and he has made outright comedy before – Full Moon High (1982), which, while it showed that all-out comedy clearly wasn’t Cohen’s forte, proved enjoyably silly. There are occasionally Cohen-esque moments here – like the police station lineup of cranky old ladies brought in in an effort to i.d. the witch – but Wicked Stepmother has an infuriating insipidity when placed up against Cohen’s other work. The magic displays are just awful, like they had been conducted by an Edward D. Wood Jr – the transformation effects are just stop-action cuts where the two objects don’t even match.

Of course the big problem that Wicked Stepmother had was Bette Davis. Davis was reportedly not happy with the project and left after several days shooting when the changes she demanded were not made. In an ingenious move Cohen simply recast the part with Barbara Carrera, explaining it away as Davis’s witch possessing a younger body and posing as her own daughter. It’s a change that does give the film a somewhat ungainly structure. Certainly Carrera is on suitably luscious and seductive form. But Davis is sad to watch. She was 81 at the time the film was made – this was in fact the last film she ever made and she died before it was even released. In the 1960s with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Davis was the first of a group of older stars to appear in a series of Grand Guignol thrillers that deliberately played on the horror of former stars well beyond their glory days. Here there is something ghastly, almost ghoulish, about watching Davis so old that she looks like a corpse with makeup plastered on, and made to go through the same arch reading she always gives. One cute joke though is a cut away to a photo of Lionel Stander’s first wife after he marries Davis – which is a photo of none other than Joan Crawford, who played Davis’s sister in Baby Jane.

Larry Cohen’s other genre films are:– the killer mutant baby film It’s Alive (1974), the bizarre alien messiah film Demon/God Told Me To (1977), It Lives Again/It’s Alive (1978), the werewolf comedy Full Moon High (1982), the monster movie Q – The Winged Serpent (1982), the sentient fast food takeover film The Stuff (1985), It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1974), A Return to Salem’s Lot (1987) and the mad scientist film The Ambulance (1990). Cohen’s other genre scripts include the psycho-thriller Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (1969), the psycho artist film Scream, Baby, Scream (1970), the deformed psycho cop film Maniac Cop (1988) and its sequels Maniac Cop II (1990) and Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence (1992) (all three of which Cohen also produced), the original story for Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers (1993) remake, the stalker film The Ex (1996), Uncle Sam (1997) about a patriotically minded undead Gulf War veteran, the hilarious psycho sperm donor film Misbegotten (1997) and the big-budget psycho-thriller Phone Booth (2002).