A deliciously nasty black comedy about a middle-aged schlub (Danny DeVito) who wants to bump off his mother and hatches a plan to do so with a bitter divorcée, who wants to bump off HIS ex-wife. The movie is completely unapologetic in its cynicism, and gives us no one to like, but for once that works in the movie's favor rather than as a turn off.
Anne Ramsey, as DeVito's battle axe mom, steals the show in a grotesquely funny performance. Even though she's a horror, you end up rooting for her, because it seems like she could kick both DeVito's and Crystal's asses at the same time with both hands tied behind her back.
Grade: B+
Throw Momma from the Train
1987
Action / Comedy / Crime / Thriller
Throw Momma from the Train
1987
Action / Comedy / Crime / Thriller
Plot summary
Larry Donner, an author with a cruel ex-wife, teaches a writing workshop in which one of his students, Owen, is fed up with his domineering mother. When Owen watches a Hitchcock classic that seems to mirror his own life, he decides to put the movie's plot into action and offers to kill Larry's ex-wife, if Larry promises to murder his mom. Before Larry gets a chance to react to the plan, it seems that Owen has already set things in motion.
Uploaded by: FREEMAN
November 19, 2018 at 07:38 PM
Director
Top cast
Tech specs
720p.BLU 1080p.BLUMovie Reviews
Refreshingly Nasty
Dan the man
I like the bit where she hit him with a frying pan
some very funny moments but that's about all
While this film got a lot of publicity when it debuted, I think it's not much better than an average film. The best aspects of the film are some of the funny little moments, but the film never seems to sustain them for very long and the overall film is a lot blander and uninteresting than you would assume based on the plot. The movie is a very loose remake of Hitchcock's STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, though comedy takes center stage instead of suspense.
Danny DeVito lives with his mother--who is the vilest and most annoying lady on the planet, played by Anne Ramsey. In some ways, Ramsey is excellent as the easy to hate mom, but she has a serious speech impediment due to real-life cancer surgery that often made it difficult to understand her. She almost needed to be subtitled or re-dubbed in order to understand what she was saying. I actually enjoyed DeVito's performance the most as the sweet but simple-minded guy who finally had enough! Billy Crystal is a writing teacher who has DeVito as a student. They become friends, of sort, though it's obvious that DeVito puts far more stock in this than Crystal. Later, DeVito offers to kill Crsytal's evil ex-wife (Kate Mulgrew) if Crystal kills Momma. Then, the plot gets pretty weird--and I'll leave that up to you to see.
Spread throughout the film were some funny, though not sustained moments. My favorite involved DeVito imagining a pair of scissors stuck through his mom's head! It sounds cruel, but it was done in one of the funnier scenes I have ever seen. I also like the one bit character in Crystal's writing class that keeps writing books about all the women with which he would like to have sex--it's pretty funny when he meets women and you see him penciling in their names in his book.
A good but highly uneven film.