# Hush (1998)

### reviewed by
Jon Popick

PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com

Hush is a preposterous little film starring Jessica Lange as an evil mother-in-law who will go to any length to get a grandson. The only way that a story this insipid could be any good would be if it was a very campy black comedy. Hush, instead, is sold as a thriller but comes off as more of a Lifetime movie of the week.

Lange (Blue Sky) stars as Martha Baring, the at-first-nice-but-later-flat-out-crazy mother of Jackson (Jonathon Schaech, That Thing You Do!). She's a single Mom (her husband was killed when Jackson was a boy) who single handedly runs a sprawling horse farm named Kilronan. As the picture opens, she is anxiously awaiting her son's return home from New York City for the holidays. Helen, (Gwyneth Paltrow, Great Expectations) his big city girlfriend is in tow.

The two women start off on an awkward foot, with Martha accidentally walking in on a nude Helen. Perhaps this is her chance to see if Helen has the proper hips for child bearing. Evidently passing the quick peek test, Martha does what any good mother-in-law would do by tampering with Helen's diaphragm. A pregnancy and a wedding quickly ensue.

The rest is your basic uninspired fodder. Helen slowly learns the deep dark family secrets, but it's too late. The only person she has to turn to is Martha's mother-in-law, Alice (Nina Foch), who has found herself unceremoniously cast from the family upon her son's death. Foch, an Oscar nominee for Executive Suite, is the only redeeming quality among the so-so performances by the other cast members.

I'm not going to get into the unbelievable parts. Like how Helen is knocked up on New Year's Eve but isn't showing at all in a scene that takes place during the summer. Or the part where she gets attacked, sliced and diced in the hallway of her New York City loft apartment but incredibly has mascara intact after being treated in the emergency room. By the way, her attacker has got to be one of the most obvious `mysteries' of film history.

Martha is a woman so evil and diabolical that she regularly attends church, but Lange comes off as only slightly mischievous. While there was a great vomiting scene and that naked first encounter, this film was still boring and painful to watch. Luckily, I was alone in the theater and could freely laugh out loud at the absurdity of it all.

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