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Mother's Day
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| Year: |
1980
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Director: |
Charles Kaufman
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| Stars: |
Nancy Hendrickson, Deborah Luce, Tiana Pierce, Frederick Coffin, Michael McCleery, Beatrice Pons, Robert Collins, Peter Fox, Marsella Davidson, Kevin Lowe, Scott Lucas, Ed Battle, Robert Carnegie
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| Genre: |
Horror, Comedy |
| Rating: |
  4 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
The self-actualisation course in improving your mental wellbeing and seeing the world in a positive light has come to an end with everyone smiling and hugging, but now it's time to go home and put those lessons into action. One little old lady (Beatrice Pons) agrees to give two of her fellow students a ride home, but as they travel through the New Jersey forests in her car the girl and boy seem to have ulterior motives: what do they want from the old dear? When the car stalls in the middle of nowhere, she gets out to check the engine, and the young couple make their move...
And turn on the radio. To a rock station. That's the joke, there was nothing sinister going on at all! Oh, except there is, because as they settle back to listen to the music the old lady's two sons, Ike (Frederick Coffin) and Addley (Michael McCleery) - who both used pseudonyms - appear and chop the boy's head from his shoulders and beat up the girl, all on the orders of mother. As you can imagine, that the cycle of using commemorative dates on the calendar for horror movies had gotten around to slurring the great American mother did not endear this to many, and it quickly gained a reputation.
It was violent, sure enough, but for all the bile directed towards it there were those who saw satire in its premise, a taking down of unthinking consumerism in the most extreme form possible in its echoes of other, benchmark films such as Deliverance and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. And it had to be said those films were better than this, which lacked their focus as the first half puported to be a comedy of the sort which would become very familiar to fans of that trash industry, Troma: this was one of their efforts in all but name, and paved the way for the mixture of comedy and horror which would typify their output, the comedy being of the gross-out variety.
Director Charles Kaufman (not to be confused with offbeat, high concept filmmaker Charlie Kaufman) was the brother of Troma supremo Lloyd Kaufman, and he was either guiding his brother or his brother informed the studio's house style; maybe a bit of both. Whatever, there was a lot of the three main female characters establishing themselves as taking a ten year anniversary vacation to celebrate their college days, and much of that consisted of lame comedy. Was this meant to get us into a cynical mood for later or was it filler because the screenplay hadn't been entirely polished? One would suspect the latter, for the tone was all over the place, but once the girls are out in the forest camping events take a nasty turn.
Ike and Addley kidnap them and take them back to their house, which is filled with tat, so Mother (Pons also used a pseudonym, but was recognisable as Joe E. Ross's wife on classic sitcom Car 54, Where are You?) can get them to re-enact the sex and violence they like to watch on television in a sanitised form. All very well, a hefty dig at the dubious entertainments of the goggle box, but for all the film's fans holding up that element as proof this was actually very intelligent, it didn't take up much of the plot, as most of the rest of it was running around getting chased. It was refreshing to see the by now clichéd slasher movie victims getting their own back, although that didn't save them all, but Kaufman was more enthusiastic when trying to be crowdpleasing than he was at taking potshots at the hypocrisies of society. Therefore you'd be far more likely to come away from this recalling the death by television set than thinking over the metaphors inherent in such a scene; interesting, but not a success. Music by Phil Gallo and Clem Vicari Jr.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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