American Gothic (1988)
A single spoiler (or three, or five) would be more confusing than illuminating, so here’s the whole deliciously-sick plot:
Cynthia (Sarah Torgov) is released from some sort of mental institution, where she’s been since her baby accidentally drowned in the bathtub. She and hubby Jeff (Mark Ericksen) join two other couples — Terri (Caroline Barclay), Rob (Mark Lindsay Chapman), Lynn (Fiona Hutchison), and Paul (Stephen Shellen) — on a trip in a small plane, headed for a resort in the Pacific Northwest.
Engine trouble forces an emergency landing on a remote island, populated only by a family of crazed religious zealots: Ma (Yvonne De Carlo, who’ll make you think Lily Munster left Herman and turned Christian fundamentalist), Pa (Rod Steiger, chewing the scenery as even he’s never done before), daughter Fanny (Janet Wright), whose fashion tastes run to vintage Little Orphan Annie, Woody (Michael J. Pollard, whose performance here makes all the rest of his nutso movie roles look like paragons of sanity), and Teddy (William Hootkins), a big, lunky moron. All three “kids” claim to be between eight and 11 years old, even though they’re all somewhere around 50. Fanny also has a “baby” — a blackened, dried-up, little mummified baby.
The family welcomes the group of young people into their home — which is frozen in time at around 1930-something, but without so much as electricity, or a phone… and the family refuses to hear any nonsense about current events of the day. After a creepy dinner filled with lots of Jesus-praising and admonitions about the evils of cigarettes and the virtues of being a member of “the clean-plate club,” the visitors are rightfully weirded out, but have no choice — they spend the night.
The next day, Fanny convinces Rob to ride a rope swing; she and Woody launch him over the edge of a cliff and onto the ocean rocks below. Cynthia discovers the “accident.”
The day after that, Lynn stumbles across all three siblings skipping rope in the woods. They tie her up, maypole-style…
When Fanny walks in on Cynthia and Jeff kissing, Fanny gorges out one of Jeff’s eyes — but she doesn’t kill him, so Ma finishes the job with knitting needles. (”That child never does finish a chore!”) Cynthia runs away into the woods, where she discovers Lynn’s body hanging from a tree.
So far, Cynthia is the only one who’s seen much of the early mayhem and other weirdness; until now, her friends have blown off her reports of dead babies and the like, because they think she’s still a tad off her nut. It takes Woody shooting Terri in the hand with a toy arrow before Terri realizes these wackos are dangerous.
When they discover Paul in a rowboat with an axe buried in his skull, Cynthia and Terri run away and hide in the woods overnight. (Everybody’s always running away into the woods.) The next day, they stumble across a cabin, and are confronted by Teddy. Cynthia is pulled away from the scene by Fanny, while Teddy chases Terri, catches her, and kills her — accidentally, this time, breaking her neck while they struggle — and then makes the audience squirm with discomfort while he rips off her clothes and checks out her body.
Back at the house, Pa whales on Teddy with a stick, while the rest of the family chants, “In the name of God! In the name of God!” Cynthia finally cracks and joins in the chanting; next thing you know, Fanny and Ma are dressing a now-fully-loony Cynthia up as one of them — she is one of them.
The family celebrates Cynthia’s, er, adoption and show her a big surprise: a whole room full of the corpses of all the people the family has killed over the years (including, of course, all of Cynthia’s freshly-dead friends). Now completely off her rocker, Cynthia is pleased. But later, when Fanny is bathing her little mummy-baby, Cynthia flips out and sees her own baby in its place. They have a tug-of-war over the mummy-baby; when its head breaks off, Cynthia attacks Fanny with a piece of furniture and bludgeons her to death. When Woody walks in, she kills him too. Then it’s on to the porch outside, where she stabs Ma to death with her own knitting needles. Up walks Teddy, and Cynthia impales him through the head (with something — we can’t tell what).
Pa comes home to find his whole family dead. He is so not happy. As he renounces God and announces that he’s giving his soul to Satan, Cynthia appears with a shotgun and shoots him in the back.
Cynthia goes back inside the house and sits near the empty baby crib. The End.
No, really, that’s the end. (Would’ve been cooler if it ended with the deranged Cynthia greeting another group of stranded visitors.)
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