Orion Pictures needed Warner Bros.’ blessing to build a comedy around the basic premise of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. Warner’s price was an Arthur sequel. Warner got Arthur 2: On the Rocks, which flopped, while Orion ended up with one of 1987’s bigger hits. That feels appropriate for a movie built around a deal where one side has no idea what it has agreed to.

Larry Donner (Billy Crystal, Parental Guidance) teaches night-school writing but can’t get beyond the first line of his own novel. His ex-wife Margaret (Kate Mulgrew, Elio) stole his previous manuscript, published it as her own, and turned it into a bestseller. Meanwhile, Larry’s least promising student, Owen Lift (Danny DeVito, Dumbo), lives under the thumb of Momma (Anne Ramsey, The Goonies), a woman who seems to begin insulting him before breakfast and rarely takes a break. After watching Hitchcock’s thriller, Owen has an idea: he’ll eliminate Margaret if Larry returns the favor with Momma. Larry thinks they’re discussing a writing exercise. Owen does not.

DeVito reportedly agreed to play Owen in exchange for the chance to direct, and he handles both jobs with the confidence of someone who already knows exactly what kind of movie he wants. Barry Sonnenfeld, then best known for shooting the Coen brothers’ early films, gives the film a wide-angle visual style that leans into its ugliness rather than polishing it away. DeVito makes Owen needy, childlike, and just dangerous enough to keep the premise uncomfortable, and Crystal turns Larry’s escalating panic into one long slow burn. Even Larry’s class of deeply questionable would-be authors is so vivid that I’d happily watch another movie about them trying to workshop a paragraph.

Then Ramsey comes in with roughly ten minutes of screen time and walks off with the whole movie. Momma is monstrous, but the actress never plays her like a sketch-comedy creation waiting for a punch line. Her voice, glare, timing, and complete lack of patience turn almost every appearance into an event. She earned an Academy Award nomination while battling the throat cancer that left her with that unmistakable rasp, and DeVito later said she continued working through painful treatment and surgery during production. She died in 1988, only months after attending the Oscars.

The story starts to wobble as it races through the final stretch, but at only 88 minutes it doesn’t have much time to wear out its welcome. More importantly, DeVito finds a strange little pocket where cruelty and affection can exist together. Owen genuinely loves the woman who makes his life miserable, while Larry slowly discovers that imagining someone dead is a lot easier than dealing with the possibility in real life.

In a year that also gave us Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Innerspace, Throw Momma from the Train still stands apart because it’s willing to be mean without becoming miserable. Plenty of the jokes that flew over younger heads in 1987 land rather differently now. The night was sultry. The movie still is, in its own deeply unpleasant way.