CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Billie Morin This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

mark.waltz There's something about a mincing man pretending to be a woman that for me is the most annoying type of female impersonator. Charles Busch has written some funny plays, but he's extremely obvious in this spoof of the women's picture of the 1950's and 60's. This particularly goes after the type of films that Ross Hunter made, and while there are some mild laughs at the expense of these films, I was left cold by this rip-off of the best John Waters films. Stark Sands, later in Broadway's "Kinky Boots", shows promise as Busch's rather lost young man who sets his sights on his mother's lover (Jason Priestley). With two strange growing teenage children, an old fart of a husband and a creepy lover, Busch gets to pull out all the stops in the melodramatics. Unfortunately, by pulling out all the stops, any sense of parody makes this seem like a badly written, over the top, and extremely overlong Carol Burnett show sketch. With Carol, you expected that, and it was over in no more than 20 minutes. It strives for shock value with issues such as incest and homosexuality dealt with bluntly (and often crudely) and such soap opera staples as infidelity and murder to carry what there is of a plot along. Eventually, Sands and sister Natasha Lyonne plot to take care of mommie dearest....for good. After a while, it wears out its welcome. References to" Gypsy", "Dead Ringer", "Portrait in Black" and "Where Love Has Gone" is peppered with shots of obviously phony backdrops. Lyonne seems intent on imitating John Waters regular Mink Stole and comes off looking like a braying Pia Zadora. The overabundance of bitchy lines, put-downs and snarling delivery of all these lines just results in a tired spoof that grates on the nerves very quickly.

Cosmoeticadotcom Why is it that the most banal and straightforward films get lauded by the Motion Picture Academy, while films that push boundaries and take risks, especially if comedies, get ignored? And why is it that there is no separate category for comedies and musicals for the Oscars? In watching the DVD of the 2003 Sundance channel film Die Mommie Die! I could not help but have these thoughts. It's a truly brilliant film, with an Oscar caliber performance by Charles Busch, playing a Joan Crawford/Susan Hayward/Gloria Swanson/Bette Davis/Doris day-like hybrid character in a spoof of the Grand Dame Guignol classic films of the 1960s that inspired such 1980s television soap operas as Dynasty and Dallas. What makes it so brilliant, aside from the dominant performance by Busch, is that it works both as camp, in the vein of the films it parodies, and also as a lampoon or satire of camp. Achieving excellence in one of these veins is difficult enough, but to go two for two in the same film is damned near miraculous. And given that the Grand Dame Guignol genre is so campy to begin with, it's even harder to achieve than in parodying other stock forms, such as science fiction, in the recent The Lost Skeleton Of Cadavra, itself a terrific spoof of 1950s sci fi, but far easier to pull off than this film's aims were. The moments that are the most memorable, and which make this film soar, are the not quite sure if one should laugh moments, because there is a sense that there is genuine emotion being felt by the ridiculous characters within. This is brilliance, and it all goes back to a terrific screenplay written by Busch, a renowned drag queen, who adapted the screenplay from a late 1990s one man show. Busch, in a red wig, also looks remarkably like Eve Arden, and although it's been years since I saw 1960s sitcom The Mothers-In-Law, which starred Arden and Kaye Ballard, I'm sure that Busch loaded a few sly references to the actress upon whom both the name and look of his character is derived.The basic premise of the film is that Busch is washed up actress/singer Angela Arden, in a loveless marriage, who takes on many lovers. Her twin sister Barbara died years earlier, her movie producer husband, Sol Sussman (Philip Baker Hall), is failing in health and business and manipulates their maid Bootsy (Frances Conroy), who is in love with him, her daughter Edith (Natasha Lyonne) is a bitch who hates her, and her son Lance (Stark Sands) is a mentally unbalanced homosexual. Add in Lothario tennis pro Tony Parker (Jason Priestley), who also wickedly savages his own TV soap opera persona, and the makings of a fun film abound. He also seems to be channeling a poor man's Peter Lawford in his brim hat, tennis shorts and penny loafers.There are numerous greatly funny sex scenes…. This is a film that never, in a billion years, would get nominated for an Oscar, the way Brokeback Mountain has, but it represents everything artistically that Brokeback Mountain is bankrupt of- originality, daring, humor, humility, and terrific writing. The same sad fact of neglect also unfortunately applies to Busch's great performance. There will come a time, though, when injustices like this even out, and when film lovers who are speaking of this film draw a blank when Brokeback Mountain is mentioned. Let's hope that we're all alive and kicking when that day comes.

rcraig62 Die, Mommie, Die! is either camp, or satire, or a satire of camp, it's difficult to tell. And there lies the problem with the movie. It's a takeoff of the sort of Joan Crawford/Bette Davis movies from both their 1940's heyday and the hagbag pictures of the 60's. The range seems to cover the whole lifespan of their careers. It's about a washed-up singer/actress played by a man, Charles Busch, in female regalia, named Angela Arden (The character is aptly named. Busch, in drag, strongly resembles Eve Arden. If only he had her comic timing and delivery, the performance would have been a tour-de-force instead of just a good female impersonation), whose affair with a young gigolo (Jason Priestley) is interrupted by the arrival of her producer-husband (Philip Baker-Hall), from a Madrid vacation, who proceeds to take firm control of his home and marriage, driving Angela to contemplate murder.From there, the plot twists into a series of murders, potential murders, sexual crises, and identity crises. It's funny in places, and has some truly unique comic turns (Angela trying to dispose of her husband with a poisoned suppository is gleefully tasteless, and a secret language spoken by Angela and her son that her husband and daughter can't tap into is a beauty - replete with subtitles, no less). But it tends to lose its place in its own chronology; eras are confused, and we can't make sense of things - the humor doesn't match the genre it's lampooning. The story is supposed to take place in the psychedelic 60's, but at the beginning, we can't place it. When Angela's son tells her he left school because a student demonstration shut the school down, it seems an anachronistic joke. There's nothing to indicate a 60's dressing-down by the kids - they just dress like spoiled Hollywood rich kids. Natasha Lyonne, as Angela's daughter, is clothed like the TV Patty Duke. And while Angela and her husband seem locked in 1940's wardrobe time warp (we suspect that's part of the joke; these people are washed-up in Hollywood because they can't get out of 1949), Angela's slick young gigolo is also dressed in 40's garb, a la Bing Crosby.Busch is really the center of the movie, though. Oddly enough, he manages to be believable in character without being believable as a woman (he gives himself away when he speaks, his tones in the lower register are clearly that of a man, not a deep-chested woman). He gives Angela a flighty, tawdry charm; we sympathize with him/her when Baker-Hall lays down the law and ends all her fun. Angela is made promiscuous without being trashy; she has style, and one can understand how she must have been appealing in her halcyon days of performing. In the musical number performed by Angela, "Why Not Me?", Busch gives Angela her glory, she looks like a star, radiant and engagingly naughty, Busch suggests Bette Midler in the routine. The dubbed-in vocal doesn't quite work, though, it's too tepid; it should have been more ebullient, boisterous, rousing. Baker-Hall is great playing the synthesis of all the Sam Spiegels and Dore Scharies, he's a robust outcast, a wash-up who still has the imagined clout to throw his weight around at home. The only performance that feels wrong is Priestley's; he's too broad, his line readings too self-conscious. The others are playing camp, he's satirizing it, like an actor employed by Mad Magazine. He gave a more creditable performance as the teen heartthrob in Love and Death on Long Island, maybe that's all he'll ever be. He doesn't have the sophistication to play a gigolo, he lacks a richness and a physical imposition. He's too boy-next-door, even with bags under his eyes that are making him look like Fred Allen.Die, Mommie, Die! does have some good laughs in it, and the performances, especially Busch's and Baker-Hall's, are really a kick. It doesn't quite capture the Crawford/Davis oeuvre too well, though. That province still belongs to the real stars.

Colette Corr Die Mommie Die is the latest comedy from writer actor Charles Busch, best known for his sublime spoof, 2000's Psycho Beach Party.Adapted from the stage play of the same name and directed by first-timer Mark Rucker, Die Mommie Die stars Busch as Angela Arden, a faded diva songstress who kills her hated husband to be with her much younger lover. Everything's coming up melodrama in this flick, which parodies the so-called 'women's pictures' of the 1940s, 50s and 60s. It reminded me of 1945's Waterloo Bridge, starring Vivien Leigh. The music is pure soap, lines are lingered on and our diva's only ever shot through gauze. There's a great supporting cast: Phillip Baker Hall is her miserly movie producer husband, Sol; Station Agent's Patricia Clarkeson is the bible-bashing maid, Bootsie; Natasha Lyonne is daughter Edith (she loves her daddy just a little bit too much!) and Stark Sands is son Lance, a pot-smoker who's been expelled from school for having gay orgies. Jason Priestley steals the show as gigolo tennis pro Tony Parker.Die Mommie Die is worth watching, although it's not a patch on Psycho Beach Party. Charles Busch is a one-note actor who cannot carry the lead role in a film. The jokes are thinner on the ground and ultimately it's just not camp enough. 2½ /5 stars.