Diary of the Dead (1976 film)

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Diary of the Dead is a 1976 neo-noir film directed by Arvin Brown. It was made by Jessica Productions, produced by Charles B. Moss.

[edit] Plot

In the film, Stan (Hector Elizondo) and Vera (Salome Jens) live with Vera's mother, Maude Kennaway (Geraldine Fitzgerald), who has already suffered a stroke. Maude bought them the house in New Haven, Connecticut, and has vast savings that she will not share with them. She is openly contemptuous of Stan because he has lost his job and is also infertile, and therefore, to her, useless. She cares more for their next door neighbor, Walter Johnson (Joe Maher).

Eventually, Stan decides to dump Maude's nitroglycerine pills in the toilet and replace them with sugar substitute pills. When Maud's best friend (and Vera's godmother), Ethel Dean (Kate Wilkinson) comes to visit when Mrs. Patterson's (Joyce Ebert) boarding house is not ready, she can't find her own pills, and dies on his couch during an attack. He tells 911 operators that the deceased is Maude Kennaway, and Dr. Klein (Austin Pendleton) provides the necessary paperwork for her remains to be taken away for cremation. Maude wakes up, finds the body, and accuses him of murder, and tries repeatedly to strike him with her cane. He manages to dodge all the blows, which causes her to stumble and cut her head on the radiator. He buries her in the backyard and plants the new tree he purchased some time earlier on top of her remains.

Stan goes to Mrs. Patterson's to collect Ethel's things, impersonating a Southern Social Security investigator, and has to bribe her. After Maude's will is read, in which Vera's portion is to be held in trust for natural born children, an investigation is opened to find Ethel Dean in order to provide her with her portion. Things begin to look very bad for Stan as his self-incriminating acts begin to work against him.