Ed and His Dead Mother

Watched June 15, 2015

1993
Starring: Steve Buscemi, Ned Beatty, Miriam Margolyes, John Glover

Ed (Steve Buscemi) runs a hardware store that his parent's established before they died. His mother passed about a year ago but he can't seem to get over the loss. He shares the same house that he grew up in with his Uncle Benny (Ned Beatty). A mysterious salesman, Mr. Pattle (John Glover) comes to the hardware store and tells Ed he can bring his mom back for $1000. Ed agrees, but when the Mr. Pattle digs up the mom, her corpse is in terrible shape so it costs a little more to find some replacement organs. Eventually she makes it back to the house and it seems like she is just as she was.

Uncle Benny, who is Ed's mom's brother is upset about this resurrection because he disliked her meddling. Ed's mother doesn't act exactly the same, she now sits in the fridge at times, which is strange. After a day she passes out and is dead again. Mr. Pattle comes back and says for some more money he can tell Ed how to keep giving more life to his mom, so she'll stay alive. Steve agrees and now he has to feed his mom two live cockroaches a day. Somehow the mom eats too many cockroaches and is filled with a renewed lust for life. She starts chasing down the neighbor's dog to eat it, to get more life energy inside her.

Meanwhile, Ed's new neighbor Storm (Sam Sorbo) is aggressively trying to seduce him for no real reason. This leads Ed to be distracted from keeping his blood thirsty mom inside the house. Ed's mom is visited by a disgruntled former employee of the hardware store. Ed's mom treats him cordially, offering him tea, then killing him with a chainsaw. 

Ed goes back to Mr. Prattle, who's job it is to just milk all the life insurance money that Ed received, didn't want the mom to become homicidal. Mr. Prattle tells Ed that for $50,000 he can share the secret of how to get rid of the mother permanently. The instructions are this: Ed has to chop off her head and bury it in the certain part of the cemetery, then bury her body in another part, and he has to do it at a certain time of night. 

After her first human kill, Ed's mom goes to the hardware store and gets a large riding lawnmower to attack her next victim. Her next victim happens to be Storm, but Ed shows up in time to chop off his mom's head. He does manage to bury her head, but just as he is getting the body from the car, the cops show up for a separate incident in the church yard.

Steve ends up going to trial for the murder of his mother, even though he just had to kill her again to stop her from murdering more people. The film is bookended by a black and white sequence of the Ed at the trial for his mother's murder. It seems like the whole thing must have been a dream, but in the end it's not and he is acquitted for killing him mom. Storm turns out to have been hired by the same company as Mr. Prattle to make sure that they got the money out of Ed. After Ed's mom goes nut, Storm quits her job and falls in love with Ed for real.

A very interesting dark comedy. Steve's motivations are so hard to determine because we don't meet his mother until she comes back. A year is a long time to sit in the ground and then come back to life. You have to suspend your disbelief to get into the story. They do a good job of answering some obvious questions that would have been plot holes in other movies. Such as why a super sexy neighbor lady would want to seduce Ed, and the answer is that it was her job.