Poor Albert and Little Annie (1972)

You won't be disappointed!

Touches You

Best movie of this year hands down!

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Rich kid Albert (Zooey Hall) is in an institute. We meet him at the beginning of the film trying to rape a nurse before he is apprehended. His doctor tells his mother that he is a lost cause and must be moved to a hospital for the insane. While being taunted by one of the male nurses there, Albert tricks him into watching one of the 'films' he's made, and ends up killing him and escaping. He arrives at his mother's house to kill her - he sees her as a whore who is not 'pure' enough. He instead comes across her housekeeper, who he taunts and kills. Yet when he meets her 11 year-old daughter Annie (Geri Reischi), they form a bond and Albert takes her away. For once he has met a girl who is pure and innocent, but the only problem are his violent sexual urges.The original name for this film was Poor Albert and Little Annie, which is a much more apt title for a film that is relatively unexploitative and character-driven. While they are scenes of violence, they are brief and contain very little blood or gore. The film concentrates more on the relationship between Albert and Annie, and the creepy fascination Albert has with her. Albert is clearly a misogynist, viewing every woman as filth who have lost their purity. Annie is sweet and innocent, and so Albert begins a strange love affair with her. He understands his urges are wrong, but he goes with it all the same.As interesting as I'm making the film out to be, you have to remember that this is a 70's grindhouse film marketed under the name of I Dismember Mama and was usually shown in a double bill with The Blood Spattered Bride (1972). This generally means that although the idea is certainly quite interesting, the execution is bad. Whereas the low- budget works in it's favour - the film has a grime to it that creates a feeling of sleaze - the film is peppered with long sections where nothing at all happens. The 80 minute running time feels much longer than it actually is, and although Hall in the lead is generally quite effective as the rich-boy psychopath, he cannot save the film from being a meandering missed opportunity.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Yes the title kicks ass but the film is just okay.I don't care what anyone says,I liked it because it was different.It had an awesome sample.."Breeding is the manifestation of worms" I actually rented it in 1999 and just bought it last week off Amazon.com for like $7.It's really rare.The part I didn't like was that he didn't kill his rich mother.(I'd like to dismember my mama myself).This is one of the films that inspired me to be a screenwriter because it's a low-budget film.I think I can do better though..We'll see.I talk about this movie at work and people are like "what?! I Dismember Mama? I like the guys hairstyle.He looked pretty scary.I also liked the part at the beginning when he was in the mental institution.I can relate to that.I'm glad I have this in my collection, right next to Friday the 13th.The naked girl at the end looked pretty nice too.This is worth checking out.

This reasonably tense, aberrant and absorbing low-grade early 70's psycho picture is nowhere near as vile or awful as its unjustly lousy reputation would suggest. Yeah, it's the unsparingly grim and twisted story of a depraved Oedipal wreck Norman Bates-style misogynistic pedophile sicko who after escaping from an experimental mental home racks up a tiny body count (three folks in total) and befriends a sweet, unsuspecting 11-year-old girl (the adorable Geri Reischl) who he considers to be the sole "pure" female he's ever made the acquaintance of, but thankfully both director Paul Leder and screenwriter William Norton (who also co-wrote "Big Bad Mama" and "Day of the Animals") never let the perverse premise degenerate into total gag-inducing filthy sleaze. Instead, they show a surprising amount of taste and restraint, creating a genuinely icky and unsettling atmosphere by chiefly focusing on star lunatic Albert's seething psychosis and severe hang-ups concerning his domineering rich b**ch mommy. Zooey Hall as the outwardly calm and composed, yet internally volatile and dangerous Albert gives a believably creepy and admirably subdued performance; Hall laudably eschews the pop-eyed raving histrionics most actors tend to do in such colorfully deranged roles in favor of a more unnervingly low-key approach which in turn makes Albert's sporadic psychotic outbursts that much more convincing and upsetting. Future "Marty Hartman, Mary Hartman" TV show star Greg Mullavey lends solid support as the hard-nosed detective determined to arrest Albert before things get too out of hand. Moreover, the grimy no-frills two-cent production values further lend a certain grungy verisimilitude to the overall bleakly credible proceedings, thus making this flesh-crawling item one of the most disturbingly plausible of 70's grind-house psycho features.

Zooey Hall, I've not seen him in any other role but, boy, was he perfect for the part of Albert. He certainly is a creepy-lookin' fellow. No wonder he's credited as playing "Joanie's Weird Boyfriend" on a Happy Days episode.I Dismember Mama is an irksome film with laughable music throughout, even for the period. The scenes where Albert is chasing Annie has accompanying music that sounds like something from the old Adam West "Batman" TV-series. It ruins the climatic scenes. Summed up, there's not much to see, well . . . some '70s nudity.