Mother's Day

Bad movie tedium

1980

Director: Charles Kaufman

Starring: Nancy Hendrickson, Deborah Luce, Beatrice Pons, Holden McGuire

I suppose so, though it seems like a waste.

THE SETUP:

Three girls get abducted in the woods by two rednecks whose mother instructs them on how to rape, torture and murder women.

DISCUSSION:

[Insert big weary sigh here.] I just didn't like it. A lot of people love it, so you should take that under advisement, and maybe if you read below you can figure out whether you want to see it or not. This was the first Troma film I had ever seen, and I think it might also be my last.

For me, a bad movie can't be self-consciously bad. It has to go bad by accident, or through lack of resources or intelligence. If something is setting out to be trashy from the start, yeah, it may be trashy, but something of the fun is gone.

The movie concerns three girls who were best friends in college, who reunite to go camping in the New Jersey woods. At least two of them have very annoying and demanding mothers, one of whom is bedridden and screams at her daughter from the other room, calling her a slut and telling her "I'm a sick woman." The girls have a very bizarre, subtly hostile relationship with each other, particularly the blonde one, who is narcissistic and unhappy with everything. The one friend who knows where they're going makes the other two put paper bags over their heads, which is bizarre in itself, and leads to a "what the fuck am I watching?" moment as the two paper bag-headed women come into a convenience store and knock everything over. Hmm, yeah. Funny.

There is a bizarre flashback detailing the joke the girls played on one of their self-centered boyfriends, Brad Dobbs, a.k.a. The Dobber. They make as though they're getting ready to make whoopee on the pitcher's mound of the local stadium, and, after he's stripped down to his red-hearted boxers [displaying his nice hairy chest], they turn the stadium lights on and embarrass him. Come on and cry on my shoulder, Dobber, I'll help you feel like a man again.

There are numerous protracted false scares, wherein someone falls over dead or grabs someone in the dark, and it just turns out to be one of the friends playing a HILARIOUS JOKE! Oh my God, how funny! I was getting really tired of it by the 30-minute mark.

The girls are settling down for the night, and the mousy one thanks the others for being her friend, and one has just finished saying "but you ARE special" to her, when suddenly they're grabbed and tied up in their sleeping bags. They guys each drag one girl, and when they get to the house the third one has been magically transported there. They tie them up, take one outside, and rape her.

Now, I don't consider myself overly politically correct, and I certainly don't mind sex and violence in a film, but I think it depends on the point of view of the film. This is an exploitation movie, fine, so it's going to have some exploitation, but here the excitement the viewer is supposed to get out of this is from watching torture and rape, rather than how scary it is or what it says about life or whatever. At a certain point you really are just watching really violent pornography. I began to have that queasy "why am I watching this?" feeling.

It goes on with lots of scenes detailing in a rather repetitive fashion just exactly how nuts these folks are, as the girls try to escape. There was significant fast-forwarding on my part. But really, not fast enough.

SPOILERS>>>>
At the end the girls escape and kill both sons, then come after the mother. The mother protests, saying "I'm a sick woman," which canny viewers alert to the subtly intertwined subtext will recognize as the same thing the bedridden mother said to one of the girls. This triggers the girl to grab a handy pair of clear plastic inflatable breasts that just happen to be laying around, and smother the old woman while seething "Don't worry, your daughter will take care of you!" Now, what are we to think of this? The only interpretation I can draw is that the daughter, who had been called a slut by her real mother, uses the fake breast as a symbol of her young sexuality and "shoves it down her mother's throat" to the point that the woman chokes on it and dies. I will admit that I had never seen a scene in which an old woman is smothered to death with a fake breast. <<<<SPOILERS END

Like I said, a great many people consider this a classic of trash cinema, so take that under advisement, but I could have totally lived without it.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

Not if you ask me, but a lot of people love it. It depends on your tolerance for self-conscious badness and your interest in watching rape and torture.

RELATED MOVIES:

THE ADULT VERSION OF JEKYLL & HYDE also features queasy-making rape and torture, in the context of a lame softcore movie.

Bad movies | Gay movies | Movie reviews | Video reviews | Video guide