D2D #60: I Dismember Mama (1974, Paul Leder)
(Featured in 42nd Street #1 and Horror on 42nd Street as part of the Frenzy of Blood double feature trailer.)
Some films, they get infamous for the wrong reason. This is especially true in the killing fields of golden-age exploitation cinema; since retitling and repackaging was widespread, films would often get slapped with monikers that poorly represented (or outright misrepresented) what was being sold. This is where I Dismember Mama comes in - the original title for this film was Poor Albert and Little Annie, which offers a much better idea of what’s contained in the film than its final, far more well-known moniker, promising as it does a gore-laden slashfest that never materializes. The retitling makes sense from a business perspective, since Leder has crafted a slow-moving and not especially commercial psychological drama, yet it gives the film short shrift in terms of its audience: With a title like I Dismember Mama, the only people who are going to give this film a shot are gorehounds and 42nd-Street sickos, who’ll be mighty disappointed by the film’s large swaths of dialogue and relative lack of violence towards mothers or most anyone else.
So what do we have here? We have, like the later (and superior) Lewis Gilbert feature Christmas Evil (which nobody saw, so that’s no use as a point of comparison, but whatever), a deliberately paced story of arrested development. Zooey Hall, in a squirmingly believable performance, is Albert, an institutionalized young man obsessed with feminine purity. His manias lead him to assault and kill women he sees as impure, which is in essence the entirety of the female sex, and the film is touched off by his escape from the asylum in which his mother has squirreled him away. Geri Reischl is Annie, the daughter of a woman Albert offs and a possible key to Albert’s salvation. See, Annie, being still in single digits, reads to Albert as thoroughly pure, and the bulk of the film is centered around Albert’s attempts to build a utopian, wholly good life around this angelically blond charge whom he has talked into hanging around him and following him where he needs to go while waiting for her mommy to pick her up. Albert is a monster, but a sad and pathetic one, and Leder doesn’t let him off the hook yet is wise enough not to sexualize the relationship between Albert and Annie; it is in fact Albert’s need to feed his psychosis yet keep Annie outside of the realms of the sexual that lead to his downfall via a surprisingly well-played scene where Albert more or less talks a whore into letting herself be killed. There’s a level where this is all far too on the nose, and it does seem to go on longer than it needs to (what little narrative momentum there is grinds to a halt whenever Leder cuts back to Albert’s mother and psychiatrist, fretting over where he is and what he might do), yet it mostly works within its own self-imposed parameters. Too, Leder is hardly a born filmmaker, and Lord knows this film would have benefited from a stronger hand behind the camera, yet he’s not entirely bereft of talent. Every now and then, he’ll find a striking image, like this closing shot that’s practically a freakin’ De Chirico painting:
So it’s incredibly imperfect. But it’s worth seeing for the bits it gets right.
