What’s this? A “Back Row Thoughts” column that’s not just a batch review? Yes, it does still occasionally happen, especially on a night like tonight. Strap in folks, it’s story time!
As a lifelong fan of horror movies, there is little that scares me on the screen. I’m afraid of a lot of things in the real world – in fact I won’t even do horror-themed mazes at amusement parks or haunted houses, mostly because I don’t want to be touched or jostled, even by actors, much less pay for the privilege. Also, I hate jump scares. I’ve seen a lot of fucked up imagery in films, including some incredibly gory kills and makeup effects, but I’ve only truly been scared a couple of times by what I’ve witnessed, and all when I was a kid, by which I mean under 10 years old.
Most of the flicks that scared me at that age I’ve long since seen and enjoyed as a teenager and as an adult, even if that enjoyment was ironic, or playfully mocking what once terrified my innocent eyeballs. We’re talking movies like Jaws: The Revenge and the original Running Man. The reason they scared me, despite not being all that graphic, was because at that age I hadn’t really experienced death all that much, so my immature brain couldn’t connect the dots that these actors I was seeing on the TV weren’t actually dying, just pretending. All I saw as Mario Van Peebles getting eaten by a giant shark (and later burped up at the end, somehow fine), not a performer doing a cheesy stunt with an even cheesier animatronic.
Of all the pictures I was too young to see, there was one that always stuck with me, mostly because what I saw was the result of a cruel prank, but also because for the longest time, I couldn’t track it down so that I could exorcise the demon and just watch the damn thing all the way through.
Well, as of tonight, I can say that my 35-year mission has finally been completed.
Let me set the scene for you. When my sister and I were very young, we would often spend summers being babysat by a woman named Pat, who was one of my mom’s best friends. Pat worked the night shift at the General Motors plant in Wilmington, DE (sadly it no longer exists, having closed down in 2009). Between Pat and her three children (and occasionally her mother-in-law), they all watched us on a sort of rotation, and my sister and I spent the summer days watching TV, swimming in their pool, and going to the playground. It was a generally good time, and Pat’s youngest daughter, who was about four or five years older than me, was my first major crush.
Each member of the family had their own methods of supervision, but the most unique of the bunch was Ricky, the middle child and only son. Ricky took it upon himself to “toughen us up,” as it were, by openly engaging in roughhousing and, let’s just call it what it was, dangerous and irresponsible behavior. He’d mimic pro wrestling moves using me as a guinea pig, he and his friends would toss us around and dunk us underwater in the pool, as well as encourage us to climb a ladder up to their roof to jump off into the above-ground, four-feet-deep tub.
But more than anything, he liked to expose us to media that was just straight-up inappropriate for kids my age. I saw my first movie with a sex scene (My Best Friend Is a Vampire) because of him, and if there was anything that could give us a good scare on HBO, he’d definitely turn it on. He was the kind of guy who, if you closed your eyes and asked him to tell you when the “scary part” was over, he’d always tell you it was okay right at the moment of truth to trick you into seeing the gore. He tragically passed away quite young, and his loss was the kick in the pants I needed to start taking my own health more seriously. I’m far from perfect, but in a weird way, I am better than I would have otherwise been because of his example, grossly misplaced though it was.
The worst incident was a horror movie he’d gotten from the local video store. For the longest time, I could only remember a few details about it. It featured a suburban mom who was a psycho killer. The house where the bulk of the action took place had a distinct look that I couldn’t describe, but I would instantly recognize if I saw it. I couldn’t remember the title, only that it was a single word, one that I couldn’t quite read or comprehend at the time. There were exactly four scenes I could recall. The mom stabs a house painter repeatedly after he turns down her sexual advances. An unseen figure kills the dad with a pickaxe, and the mother later shoots this same assailant with a shotgun. There’s a scene where the daughter sees the painter’s blood on the wall of the room where he was killed and screams. And finally, there was a scene that I simply referred to for the longest time as “rat bucket.”
Those two words were all that was needed for my sister and I to commiserate about the trauma that this movie inflicted on us. We were mortified by what we saw, and ran screaming from the room while Ricky laughed. I should point out that I was, at best, six years old at the time, and my sister was only five. We had no business watching this movie, and Ricky had no business showing it to us. We obviously didn’t even make it to the end of the video, and Ricky was roundly scolded and grounded for the prank, but that movie stuck with us ever since.
For years after the fact I tried to track this movie down. Whenever I was in a new town that had a video store, I would go in and see if they had it. Because I couldn’t remember the title, all I could muster was the description I just gave two paragraphs ago, but that hardly nailed things down. All I got from the people who worked these various Blockbusters and their local competitors was an odd look of confusion, along with the occasional grunt of interest when I told them about “rat bucket.”
Even as an adult, this felt like a lost cause, to the point where I sometimes wondered if my sister and I had imagined the whole thing. I would go on message boards, pore over the nascent IMDB, whatever avenue I could think of, to find this movie. Back when I was working at ESPN, we’re talking as recently as 2010, there was no info to be found, much to my own consternation, as well as that of the guy training me, because he too was a horror movie buff and had never heard of this. He wanted to see “rat bucket” for himself after hearing me talk about it, but our efforts were fruitless.
Every so often for the next few years, the scene would pop into my head and I’d do a cursory search to try to find it, but no luck. Sometime around 2014 or 2015, after I had moved to California, I went back home for Christmas, and I got to talking with my folks about a bunch of topics, and eventually horror films came up, as they often would, especially with my late brother-in-law, who was quite the aficionado, particularly when it came to Alien and The Exorcist. As we chatted, I casually decided to search one more time on my phone. After a few promising links, I found a forum post talking about “rat bucket,” and how the OP had also searched for it for years. As I scrolled down the thread, the title finally revealed itself.
EPITAPH
“I found ‘rat bucket!'” I exclaimed to the kitchen table, instantly halting the conversation. My sister glared at me, jaw dropped. “You found it? Seriously?” Holy crap, holy crap, holy crap! It was there. It was real. As soon as I googled the title, I got all the information I had been searching for, and the memories, good and bad, came flooding back to my mind.
I also figured out why it had been so hard to find the flick. While Epitaph was indeed the original title when the movie was made back in 1987 – and obviously a six-year-old would never be able to read and understand what that word meant, hence why I could never recall it – the name was changed after Troma Pictures acquired the rights for a DVD release (God bless you, Lloyd Kaufman, you wonderfully sick son of a bitch!). The movie never got a theatrical run. It was produced by the now-defunct City Lights Entertainment Group, which specialized in low and medium budget films strictly for home video, mostly in the form of B-movie slashers, though they eventually expanded to include action films with marketable names (Jean-Claude van Damme among them) before shutting down in 2002. When Troma picked it up, along with what I assume was a trove of other City Lights properties, the title was changed to Mommy’s Epitaph, presumably to emphasize the madness of the central character, and maybe make an end-around reference to Mommie Dearest.
So, my nemesis finally had a name, but the journey was not yet over. While I was able to find the movie on IMDB, and even watch the trailer to confirm that this was indeed the picture I was looking for, there weren’t any copies in print. It would be several more years before I found it on DVD via Netflix, and I instantly added it to my queue. Sadly, the DVD rental service that began the company’s existence folded a few years ago, before I could get it to the top of my list. Sure, I could have moved it up any time I wanted, but there were other priorities, and I often sat on Netflix DVDs for months at a time. I still have the first two discs of Picard: Season 1 that were sitting on my Blu-Ray player when mailers ended – even Netflix itself told not to bother sending them back, and that I wouldn’t be charged for keeping them, as they had nowhere else to go.
In the 2020s, I’ve looked Mommy’s Epitaph up a few times to keep it fresh in my memory, to have it as prey to one day vanquish. Today was one of those days where it would pop into my head, causing me to check on it to see if it was available anywhere. To my eternal shock, it was on Amazon Prime. I had to stop myself. Would this finally be the moment? Would I at last finish what I involuntarily started over three decades ago?
Fuck it, let’s do this thing.
So here’s the deal with Mommy’s Epitaph. It is as chintzy a production as you could possibly imagine. I got flashbacks to The Room while watching it, except that The Room is a glorious piece of shite that became accidental genius because of Tommy Wiseau’s thoroughly misguided earnestness in making it. This is just a shitty 80s B-movie, and it shows. The soundtrack is a mixture of single-note progression piano lines reminiscent of Halloween with the occasional knockoff of the Jaws theme thrown in for fake-outs when the camera stalks a possible victim only to reveal something innocuous like a dog (think of the Muffin bait-and-switch from the end of Friday the 13th Part 2), and more often than not it overpowers the spoken dialogue, making some conversations utterly unintelligible, not that the characters say anything interesting. The script reads like it was written by me at age six. Were it not for the murders, you’d see this kind of acting and screenplay in an Afterschool Special.
Written and directed by Joseph Merhi, who was apparently one of the two head honchos at City Lights, the film does borrow a little bit from Mommie Dearest, in that the main character is psychotically obsessed with controlling her daughter, only in this case instead of Joan Crawford, she’s Pamela Voorhees. The movie begins with the Fulton family arriving at their new home. Having watched the picture all the way through, I now realize why the sight of the house stuck in my mind so much, as an establishing shot of the front of the building is used as a transition between nearly every scene. Anyway, we see the family pull up in their car (which they always park on the grass for some reason), and we meet our four leads. Mommy herself is called Martha (WHY DID YOU SAY THAT NAME?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!), played by Delores Nascar, which sounds like the stage name of a porn actress who exclusively works in scenes where she seduces a racing driver or a mechanic. She’s married to Forrest (Jim Williams), and with the help of Forrest’s mother Virginia (Liz Kane), the three of them care for the 16-year-old Amy, played by Natasha Pavlovich, who would go on to have a steady acting career in TV and film, including appearing in Son of the Pink Panther. Also, for some reason, a stray dog wanders in (you can see the stage hand kneeling behind the car to shoo it into the frame), and they adopt it.
Amy is annoyed, as this is apparently the latest in a string of moves from town to town, ostensibly to help Martha get over some mental issues and a drinking problem. However, we quickly see the real reason. While Amy’s away at school the next day, a painter (Ed Reynolds) comes by to start redecorating the house, covering up old crayon marks on the bedroom walls. Martha comes in wearing a silk nightgown and prepositions him multiple times. When he finally rebuffs her and calls her old, she leaves the room, only to quickly return (after a meaningless fade to Virginia in the garden and one of 37,000 shots of the house itself) and stab him repeatedly with a butcher knife. This is one of the scenes I remembered from childhood, though I remembered it being, well, faster. In my head I saw her stabbing him in the back multiple times in quick succession, followed by her turning him around and stabbing him even more times in the chest, so rapidly that it felt like she was just pounding his torso like a drum, only while holding a knife. Instead, the actual scene is a bit slower, but a lot more graphic, as she does get him in the back and front, but we linger on shots of the knife penetrating and twisting inside him, then cut to his blood dripping into the paint tray on the floor, which is a fun touch. It’d be even cooler if we later saw Martha painting the walls pink. We do eventually also get a scene of Amy seeing the bloody wall and screaming, but that doesn’t happen until the final 15 minutes. It makes me wonder now if Ricky would pause, fast-forward, and rewind the tape to make sure we saw as much grotesquerie as possible. I wouldn’t have put it past him.
Anyway, apparently Martha’s killer instincts are so ingrained that the grizzly murder of a house painter is a routine bother to Forrest, who sighs that she promised she’d stop doing this. Martha makes up an excuse that the painter tried to rape her, but it’s clear he’s heard that story before, and so he sets about the chore of burying the poor guy in the front yard, somehow digging a grave with a pickaxe instead of a shovel. Forrest himself is the next to go, but not before securing the services of a psychiatrist named Shirley, played by Linda Tucker-Smith, to find a pretext to make a house call, as Martha would never agree to see a shrink in person. My memory of Forrest getting the pickaxe in his back is indeed borne out, but what I didn’t know or remember was that it was the painter himself rising from the grave to do it after attacking Amy in her bedroom. After Forrest is gumped, Martha encounters the painter, whom she calls David despite no scene of introduction or naming in the credits, and she asserts that she knew he wasn’t dead when she stabbed him, but figured he’d suffocate after being buried alive. Either way, she shoots him with a rifle she conveniently has for this scene only, and he falls out the window, this time dead for good. No word on if they’ll ever replace the broken window, but the family has to mourn Forrest in secret, as Martha forbids calling the police. Meanwhile, I’m just guffawing at the sheer silliness of a guy rising from his grave after getting the OJ Simpson treatment, and randomly getting inside to attack the daughter and the father, rather than the woman who actually stabbed him multiple times… instead of just, you know, escaping and going for help.
For having not seen a single frame of this picture in over 30 years, I was surprised at how easily it gets to the point. In a subplot I definitely don’t recall from before, Amy meets a boy named Wayne (Flint Keller) at her high school, and they start dating, but the relationship is kept from Martha because it would trigger another murder spree. Meanwhile, I’m distracted by the fact that there’s no actual school when Amy goes to school, just a public park with a driveway and parking lot, one that I’m pretty sure I went to on a break when I was doing door-to-door sales last fall, as the layout of the street matches a neighborhood that was my territory for a day. I also don’t remember the grandmother or the dog, so now I’m genuinely starting to question whether or not I tried to sit and watch the picture straight through when I was a kid, or if I just wandered in and out of the living room through a combination of boredom and fear.
Finally, about two thirds of the way through, we get to “rat bucket.” See, for much of the second act, Shirley has been pretending to be Martha’s new neighbor, forging a friendship where they go shopping and day drink together. However, when Shirley starts hinting that Amy should be allowed to grow up and date boys her age, Martha gets more and more suspicious, until she eventually figures out the truth. One day, supposedly two weeks after they meet (though you’d never know from the way the scenes progress), Shirley comes over to the house unannounced (weird), gets startled by the dog (Chekhov’s Pup?), and Martha uses the opportunity to sneak up behind her and knock her out.
What follows is the scene that has haunted me for most of my life. With her shirt stripped off, revealing a bra a bit too suggestive for day-to-day wear, Shirley has her arms tied and suspended from a rafter. Martha then arrives and shows her what she says is a rather hungry live rat. It’s a little hard to believe, because this rat is a CHONKER, but we’ll go with it for the sake of argument. After taunting her for a few minutes, Martha places the rat in a metal pail, and straps it to Shirley’s stomach. With Shirley begging her to stop, Martha uses a butane torch to heat the base of the bucket, driving the rat insane with fear, burning, and hunger, until it eats its way through Shirley’s stomach, emerging bloody but unharmed out of her back.
For cheap 80s horror, this is an amazing effect, and it DESTROYED me as a child. I couldn’t fathom anything so gruesome and disgusting, to say nothing of the sheer depravity it would require to even think up this kind of a death. As a kid, I was ruined. As an adult, I just found myself equal parts fascinated by the execution of the scene and laughing at the stupid dialogue. Watching it now, I couldn’t help but clap. Tom Savini would be proud of a kill this good.
Once that sequence was over, I was prepared to at long last finish the job. Unfortunately, there wasn’t really anything to finish. The film is only 94 minutes long, and once we hit that peak, there’s not much else to do. There were about 25 minutes left to go, and it was mostly just falling action with a couple of climactic additions to the body count, but all in all they’re pretty tame, not nearly as gory or creative as what I had endured as a six-year-old and just relived with a giddy grin on my face. The movie ends pretty much how you’d expect an 80s slasher would, and while the final moments are a bit fucked up, there was clearly an even better version that was right there for the taking.
In the end, this was a pretty standard straight-to-video feature for its time, which I kind of expected. I was terrified way back when, because I was in no way prepared to see it at the age I did. Now I can see it as the type of movie that you’d see lovingly lambasted on The Cinema Snob or other similar YouTube channels that seek out these flimsy VHS-era gems. Still though, I feel a bit stronger now than I did an hour and a half ago. I finally got through it. I beat the devil. Mommy’s Epitaph – or just Epitaph as I knew it – had a hold on me for so long. Like Ahab hunting Moby-Dick, it was always out there, taunting me after the wounds it had inflicted years before. Unlike the captain of the Pequod, though, I kept it at a distance until the opportunity presented itself to vanquish the demon once and for all, and I didn’t drag anyone else down with me.
I bet Ricky’s having himself a good laugh right now.
Join the conversation in the comments below! Have you ever seen this movie? Are there films that you vaguely remember that you’ve tried to track down. Seriously, how fucked up is the rat bucket? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) as well as Bluesky, and subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!
I Actually Paid To See This 