'M' is for the meatloaf that she made me.
'A' is for the ass kickings she gave me.
'M' is for the months of psychiatric treatment I underwent because of her horrible parenting.
'A' is for the arsenic I forced down her fucking throat before I cut her into little pieces and fed her to the dog...

All together they spell "Mama", as in I Dismember Mama, a rather brutal and unfriendly film about family values and just how little value families can have. Pushed aside by many horror and mainstream critics alike as "just another throwback to a time where exploitation films were as common as bell bottoms and hair picks in afros... and not even a 'so bad it's good' exploitation film at that...", I surprisingly enjoyed the movie. It's dark, grim, a little sick, a little perverse and pretty damn funny if you can look past those first four characteristics! Of course, only the sickest and most desensitized of human filth can do that with a grin... okay, you can stop pointing at me now, we get the point. Than again, pretty much any b-movie viewers could sit through this movie and not be affected, especially if you've seen a few Italian cannibal and slasher fare in your days, so I think there's quite a few of you out there who can take just as much amusement from Albert's big poofy hair as I did! Who's Albert?! What kind of retarded monkey shit question is that?! Oh, right, the review...

As our opening credits role, some greasy douche bag thinks it's funny to blind us, the audience, by directing his little film projector straight into the camera. This brings up an interesting quagmire: are we watching him in a movie, or is he watching us as HIS movie? Gah, too much brain bending for this early in the flick, so let's move on! The greaseball in question is Albert, a mental patient who's living up the good life at his friendly neighborhood nuthouse because he's "crazy" for thinking that all women are worthless and evil whores... and this is incorrect how? Oh, and he tried to kill his mom for that same reason. Before the women impale my brain with their spiked heels, let's get the focus on Albert who, despite having a mental condition that tends to drive him into bloodthirsty frenzies when members of the female gender are about, is still cared for by female nurses. You'd think his head doctors would've thought about the possible consequences of a situation like that... or at least appointed nurses with S.W.A.T. team training. While watching his little movies in the solitude of his rather plush room at the asylum (his mom's rich, so he gets special privileges), Albert's happy time is interrupted when one of his nurses enters without knocking and tries to take his films away. Being a lunatic (and under such low security confines), Al attacks the broad, being restrained by jack booted orderly thugs before he can get the real damage in. Due to this and recent other incidents of similar anti-feminine brutality toward the staff (and yet he's still given FEMALE nurses and very relaxed security), there's talk of sending young Albert away to a REAL asylum, where he'll be set up with deluxe accommodations of the padded kind.

Poor, misunderstood Albert, a promising young man corrupted by the sinister perversions of women, isn't happy with the idea of being put under REAL security for a potentially dangerous lad like himself, so before he can be shipped out, he takes one last advantage of the relaxed conditions and slits an orderly's throat before heading for the hills, Hazard County style!... only without the modified stock car... or the attractive cousin in the short cut shorts... or the drunken moonshiner uncle... or the mechanic named Cooter... heh, "Cooter". Decked out in his "greasy pimp" attire and accompanied by his "Scooby-Doo" chase music, our antagonist scopes out a nearby supermarket parking lot in search of transportation, finally stealing a set of wheels... a set of wheels with a car attached! What a streak of luck! Score one for the bad guy! Gimme five Albert!... fine, be a dick... dude, you're so uncool since you done time... Al makes a B-line (perfect for a B-movie *rimshot*) to mama's house, intending to finish the job he started before his confinement. When he gets there though, he finds mom's not home. What he does find is the maid, Alice, all alone and vulnerable and female, three things that don't bode well for her future well being. Sure enough, our greaseball tortures the underpaid broad mentally and physically, slapping her around, making her strip for him, forcing her to sing and dance, then stabbing her to death because, all together now kids, "SHE'S A WORTHLESS AND EVIL WHORE!". Good job boys and girls, there will be peanut brittle and orange flavored drink after the show for each of you.

Not long after killing the slightly chubby and middle-aged housekeeper, Albert finds himself babysitting her young daughter Annie, who arrived home soon after mommy was eviscerated. Seeing as how Annie is still very young and therefore "innocent" and yet to be overcome by the bitchiness and inherent sins of womanhood, Albert doesn't really have a problem with her. Actually, the skeevy, dirty lunatic takes a liking to her and decides to take her out and enjoy some playtime with his new friend! I'm not kidding or making perverse little innuendoes about pedophilistic acts, the two actually go out for a friendly frolic through town, with Al prancing along like a little white boy imitating Big Bird with a muppet up his asshole... and I don't like the way he's lookin' at that bald old fuck Gordon either... So, while these two are out fulfilling their own ridiculous "Summer of Love" shpiel, the fuzz find Alice's body at Mrs. Albert's Mom's house and the chase continues. Speaking of this supposed chase the cops have been on since Al's escape from his captors at the crazy house, I guess the old adage, "the best place to hide is out in the open" is true despite the fact it sounds like something a gender confused accountant in a haze of Opium and Wilfred Brimley's Diabetes medication made up while on the crapper one morning... Anyway, it's all truer than it sounds, as Al and his hostage/playdate have made little effort not to attract attention in the middle of public places. You'd think people would've been calling the cops on them even WITHOUT Albert being a dangerous serial killer, just because it's odd to see a grown man frolicking with a little girl like that... unless Al's a priest and the Pope's covering for him... Are the police even LOOKING for Albert at this point, or do they kinda sit back for 24 hours and wait in hopes to see if dangerous, deranged, escaped, psycho killers will come back and apologize for their monkey shines?

Possibly realizing that the local law enforcement might bother to look for him at some point, Albert takes Annie to a fancy hotel... grown men checking into hotels with little girls... must be no one in the '70s had ever heard the word "pedophile"... except the Catholics... okay, an image of me flogging a deceased equine is a common image that would pop into a viewer's head right about now, and let me assure you assholes I get the point. Besides, once Letterman, Leno, O'Brien, Kilborn and everyone over at "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" has made enough Catholic priest child molestation gags to choke a calculator, it's lost it's charm (as much charm as you can get out of stories of old religious guys forcing sex on kids). In order to live out his dream of marrying a virgin, Al's finally been reduced to getting hitched with a pre-pubescent in a time when every girl 16 or older's had something stuffed in her that wasn't in the hands of an OB-GYN. Of course it's all in playful (and disturbing) fun, since I doubt Al's got the state license to be joining people in unholy matrimony. When Al makes a threatening call to his mom after the "ceremony", the police are there in hopes of just such a phone call. What happens in this scene is completely lost on me though, as I was far too distracted by a lamp in the frame that consisted of nothing more than a number 69 with a lamp shade attached... is Al's mom a swinger?! What kind of person has a "69" lamp in their fucking living room?! Then again, maybe I'm more right than I thought and it really IS a fucking living room, as in, a living room for fucking, or, a fucking room, as in, a room in which people engage in intercourse! Krissy and I converted the Tomb's level 4 basement game room into a fucking room, and you should've seen how impressed our Adult Sex Addicts Anonymous group was!

Back to the "honeymoon", Al spends most of the night creeping back and forth between his bedroom and Annie's, trying to work up the perversion to "consummate" the union. Finally he decides to drop the whole matter and just sneak out to pick up a whore. See Congress, if ever there was a reason to legalize prostitution, "as a preventive method to pedophilia" is it! Shit, if the Pope provided his clergy with sluts to go with those little hats, none of this would be a problem! I know, I know, dead horse, dead horse... Pickin' up a slut at a pool hall, everything's going fine for Al and his date, though if he'd stop and take the time to think about it, kissing her is like putting your lips on 36 dicks, right Dante? Oops, sorry, wrong movie. Shit, it's not even the right damn time frame! Sure enough, as soon as the playing slips from foreplay to DefCon 1 sexual encounter, Al flips his shit and strangles the bitch. Oh well, better she die then live to give him herpes or a wide assortment of other uncomfortable genital infections I guess. But, doing it in his hotel room probably wasn't the best of places, since his underaged bride was trying to snooze in the next room at the time. No longer able to ignore the loud quaking resonance of her own deep snoring, Annie apparently startled herself awake and wandered into Al's room just in time to witness the greasiest man in her life focusing his attention on... another woman. Not too young or naive to know the difference between hardcore XXX adult action and homicide, Annie screams and gives away her witnessing of the entire scene before taking flight down the fire escape. Damn fire escapes, bane of the common serial killer no matter where you live.

The chase leads the happily married couple to a mannequin warehouse (damn, there sure were a lot of mannequin warehouses in the '70s. If horror movies are any indication there must've been at least 3 to each friggin' city block!), where Al's attempts to talk Annie out of her fear and back into his bed are met with little more than feverish gasps for breath and more screaming. Finally fed up with his new wife always nagging him and not giving him any chances to explore his own wants and needs, Al decides it's time to annul this relationship and begins to stalk her with a conveniently placed meat cleaver, which is VERY fucking convenient when you take into consideration that they're in a MANNEQUIN warehouse, a place you normally would NEVER find a meat cleaver or large butchering implement of any kind. An incredibly awkward slow motion chase follows, highlighted once more with that same Scooby-Doo chase music, then ending with Al making one of those classic "the killer gets over zealous and swings WAY too hard for such a close proximity" moments, sending himself careening through a window and head first down to the concrete three stories below. Annie simply watches physically unscathed from her perch safely in the warehouse window as the police finally show up just in time to be as useless as always in the slasher genre. And so it ends, with Al ultimately becoming his own worst enemy in the tragic comedy of human errors, because he took his eyes of the prize (Dismembering Mama) and got sidetracked with the unhealthy urges towards little girls and whores. Don't be like Humpty Dumpty here kids, always keep your eyes on the prize!

Seriously, I was surprised at how disturbing this movie could carry itself at times. Not only did it hold onto that whole dirty feeling of all around corruption that films of the '70s are notorious for (I blame the low grade film stock with all that damn smudging and graining), but Albert was portraying that same feeling the film had throughout. I was actually uncomfortable at times, the way Zooey Hall's face was practically screaming "dirty man with dirty mind" at me while bitch slapping me with a frozen tuna... creepy shit, even after you take into consideration the bastard's name is "Zooey". As if that wasn't unnerving enough, the guy seems to slime his way from "lunatic with greasy hair" to "Gamera, friend of all children" back to "lunatic with greasy hair" with an unnatural ease and grace that most people who watch this film don't notice or do notice and decide to ignore because they think it's a sign of retardation instead of acting... unless of course this opinion is simply a sign my own retardation... either way it's sad that ol' Zooey didn't have more roles. As for me, I'm gonna go beat the shit outta Michael Graves, the pompous ass...

Fans of that monolith of '70s hippy incest culture known as "The Brady Bunch" may like to take note here that Geri Reischl, who played Annie, also went on to play Jan Brady in that accursed bastard spin-off offspring of the show known as "The Brady Bunch Hour" in 1977. I don't know if it even made it past the pilot episode to be honest, which wouldn't shock me since the guest star was Mr. Tony "Felix the prissy neat freak" Randall. Reischl's only other credit is Brotherhood Of Satan, which I haven't seen so I don't wish to comment on it, so go fuck a duck, but not a nice and innocent duck, just one of those trampy ducks who like to shake their feathered ass at you and lick their bills... little sluts. Then we have director Paul Leder would go on to do numerous movies that I've never seen nor will likely ever go out of my way TO see, but there is one scar on my soul that Mr. Leder left that I will sadly NEVER be able to escape... A*P*E... and yeah, I know, that rhymed... I'm the lyrical gangster motherfucker, and don't you forget it! In summation, I Dismember Mama was a simple slasher flick that worked on it's own depravity at times and is far from being a pleaser for all types of genre fans. Some may not like the sleaziness, while on the other hand some may bitch about the lack of gore for a movie with this kind of title from a period where shock and the red stuff was the popular road. As for me, I'm neither too weak to be offended by the trash nor was in in "gore whore mode" when I watched this film, so the missing crimson and lack of internal organs worn on the outside really didn't disappoint me. Don't get me wrong, by no means is this movie free of cheese, it's actually pretty heavy with the curds of b-moviedom, but it can work as a legitimate flick when it wants to. If only they'd slapped on a better title. That "rose by any other name" crap may have worked fine for the Bard, but that's because his plays were titled "Macbeth" and "Romeo and Juliet", not stuff like "The Gore Queen Of Hell" and "Feud Of The Trashy Love Killers". I haven't been this confused about a semi-serious movie's title since Surf Nazis Must Die!.

Also Known As: Crazed ; Poor Albert And Little Annie

Sequels: Nope

If You Liked This Flick, Check Out: I Spit On Your Grave or Maniac