Throw Momma from the Train (1987)
Owen asked his friend, Larry, for a small favor...
Tonight’s movie comes from a conversation I had with a coworker. I most likely would have done this a long while ago, back towards when it was first mentioned to me, but as it turns out Amazon didn’t have it as a free to watch Prime movie at the time so I kind of just put it on a list and waited. Well, after getting that Monster Hunter movie taken care of last week - and a near call with getting replaced on the docket with the new animated Witcher movie - we finally get to see just what trouble the city slick and his little penguin friend can get up to. Tonight, someone is gonna Throw Momma from the Train.
A comedy is at play here. The plot is quite solid, all considering the comedy being at play here. That being said, how much you laugh might be a bit more… nuanced than in some movies. Like, I don’t know it’s kind of hard for me to really describe it without feeling like I’m turning my nose up at someone - and considering I’m a person who likes puns and laughs at farts, I shouldn’t be turning my nose up at anyone. The humor feels almost a bit dated - not really in a manner where “well that didn’t age well,” as much as it feels much more like a subdued Home Alone kind of humor than something you would see out of the modern Superbad or those kind of shoes. For me, I was entertained, I was in a good mood about it, and occasionally - like at the line about a Terminator - I would even chuckle. The comedy feels a little above-natural, but it’s not extreme to the point of Three Stooges slapstick lunacy where you feel like someone should be dead from it. Perhaps situational humor would be a good way to describe it - although there is some straight up slapstick moments in there, a lot of the proposed laughs come from the preposterous nature of the situation at play. You know what? Let’s just talk about the plot and maybe that will elaborate better.
The story here consists of two main players. Our first is a professor and writer, jaded about his ex-wife and making claims she has stolen his book and made all the money off of it. Upon the mention of her, he uncontrollably responds with some harsh names and statements like “I wish she was dead.” The second we see is a shorter man whose a student in the class - and who really hates the way his mother treats him. In all honesty, it’s not very nice - and he tends to fantasize about killing her. When a discussion about why the story the student wrote wasn’t very good, the student takes his advice and goes to catch an Alfred Hitchcock movie - and just happens to take the message of it the wrong way, the way that’s a lot more literal than intended. The rest of the movie is the hijinks that happens as it’s believed the professor has killed his ex-wife, given he has motive, and his student wants the professor to uphold his end of the imagined bargain to swap murders and get rid of his mother.
The actors do a good job here. There’s plenty of calm collected moments stemming from the student to contrast the acknowledged absurdity of the situation he’s now stuck in. You could associate with the characters, or perhaps agree with their motives in part because of how the actors act. The situations are nuts, but the players within them come off as mostly believable - outside a few moments that are perhaps played a bit up for laughs. They also deliver all these lines nice and understandable, and with plenty of well delivered body language.
Only one realizes a plot is being hatched.
It’s certainly a good thing the actors do a good job like they do, because you won’t find much to really be impressed with when it comes to costumes or effects here. We’ve heard me state it a ton, but common outfits really don’t make your brain go “this is such awesome costume work” even though the fact it blends in just fine means the department really did do a pretty good job. That said, we do have a few effects type shots in there, mostly in the hallucination segments of the student offing his mom. They look fine - certainly nothing that’s going to impress the over-flashy effects work of modern day cinema, but still fine. Settings are actually rather varied, with a few outdoors shots and some varied indoor shots of buildings of various degrees of fancy - all looking quite different.
Audio is there and comes through fine. You hear lines, you understand lines, and all of the said lines are delivered quite well. If it’s meant to be panicked, it is. Levels are all balanced quite well, and the background music does it’s job of adding to scene. Perhaps a little too well, as honestly I don’t remember any music at all despite knowing it was there, outside of the Hawaiian boat music which is quite festive, if not a bit expected. The movie sounds as good as it looks, and considering it’s an older movie it holds up quite fine in both regards - although how much of that is the streaming version on Amazon and how much of it is the movie perhaps just having a really good HD transfer for it to put on there I don’t know.
So coming back around to it - the comedy. If the story doesn’t sound like it’s goofy enough just from the concept, then perhaps the cast will remind you of the fact it’s a comedy and not a horror movie. As you watch it, DeVito has a great array of moments where either his actions or his expressions can be comical, although actions are honestly only comedic in the sense of a fantasy movie - in the real world stalking and killing or plotting to kill isn’t really nearly as funny, and perhaps some people wouldn’t be able to separate the fact that the two aren’t one and the same enough to enjoy it. Crystal getting smacked in the face with a skillet should be amusing to everyone, but some of the more raunchy bits (although they are never close to graphic or showing anything naughty) might need to be checked by parents for younger maturity levels despite having some amusing lines during them.
The face of a murderer?
The movie is fun, and a decent comedic play on a idea from Hitchcock that they even put into the movie as a movie. The actors do a good job of being entertaining, despite being preposterous the concept still comes off as grounded, and the writing is good enough to twist a premise situation out of it’s normal genre pitch and turn it into a much more laughable and cheerful thing. I don’t know how much of it will land for a younger - or “newer” i suppose - audience, but I had some fun here.