To truly appreciate the beautiful, unhinged mind of Danny DeVito, you have to look at the genesis of his madness. Long before he was crawling naked out of leather couches or offering eggs in trying times as Frank Reynolds on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia—a role that feels like the glorious zenith of his comedic ethos—DeVito was already cultivating his signature brand of cinematic depravity behind the camera. As a massive fan who has consumed practically every frame of film he’s ever touched, I look at his 1987 directorial debut, "Throw Momma from the Train," as the Rosetta Stone for his uniquely dark and outrageous soul. It’s thrilling, it’s nasty, and it proves that DeVito has always been a master of finding absolute hilarity in the grotesque and the desperate.
We meet Larry Donner, a formerly successful author whose life has been completely derailed. His ex-wife stole his manuscript, published it as her own, and became wildly rich and famous, leaving Larry vibrating with murderous resentment while relegated to teaching night school. Sitting in that depressing, fluorescent-lit classroom is Owen Lift. Owen is a timid, socially stunted man-child writing a terrible mystery novel as a psychological escape from his own living hell: a claustrophobic existence under the thumb of his nightmarishly abusive mother.
The bridge between these two boiling pots of misery is a simple, tragically misunderstood piece of homework. Desperate to get Owen to understand narrative motivation, Larry offhandedly tells his student to watch Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. But Owen’s beautifully warped, literal mind misses the academic point entirely and internalizes the plot as a brilliant, practical solution to both of their problems.
What unfolds from this delicious setup is a breathless, manic exploration of our darkest, most suppressed intrusive thoughts. Who hasn't, in a moment of pure, blinding frustration, wished away "the" problem? It is the exact kind of sociopathic musing the gang in Sunny entertains daily, but here DeVito waters that taboo little seed with utter, suspenseful absurdity.
The dynamic between Crystal and DeVito is pure kinetic energy. Crystal’s slow descent from a witty, sarcastic intellectual into a cornered, frantic animal is a joy to watch, but DeVito gives Owen a weird, tragic vulnerability that makes his psychotic leaps in logic deeply endearing. But the absolute titan of the picture is Anne Ramsey as the titular Momma. She's Godzilla in a floral housedress, an unstoppable, gravel-voiced terror who commands the screen. Yet, DeVito directs her with just enough pathetic frailty that you almost feel a flicker of pity for her—right before she hurls another piece of cast-iron psychological abuse at Owen's head.
If I have to look at it critically, purely through the lens of the unapologetic, chaotic bleakness that I crave from DeVito's later work, the film does of course fall a little short. For a movie built on such a wickedly mean-spirited premise—the literal execution of family members—it softens in the final stretch. It pulls its punches just enough to remind you it’s an '80s studio comedy rather than a fully untethered descent into madness, abandoning some of its venom for a more palatable resolution. But that slightly compromised third act doesn't strip the enamel off the ride. It’s a fast, fierce, and fiercely funny film that establishes DeVito’s lifelong fascination with the fringe class and the morally flexible. It might not be a flawless cinematic masterpiece, but it operates at a fiercely entertaining altitude, making it an indispensable, profoundly satisfying piece of the DeVito canon.
8/10
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