Mother’s Day (1980)

Mother’s Day is a film from the early days of Troma, written and directed by Charles Kaufman (no, not that Charles Kaufman) about a trio of young women on a trip to the woods where they run afoul of a murderous old lady and her mutant hillbilly sons. Most people are familiar with Troma’s more modern sensibilities where they just make sophomoric ultra-violent low-budget comedies, but in the early days they were more arch low-budget horror efforts that were just slightly left of center.

Mother’s Day plays out like a parody of backwoods brutality films for a good chunk of the film. The principal villains of the piece, Ike and Addley, are goofballs of the highest degree. Addley wears a leather football helmet and does a Xena-esque warcry as he dives through things, Ike wears suspenders and plays like the dollar-theater version of the hitchhiker from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The most character building they have is that they have the sort of love for their mother that only a mutant hillbilly in a backwoods brutality movie can have and that one hates punk music and the other hates disco.

Weirdly the movie takes a very dark left turn midway through the second act and while the semi-comedic tone isn’t entirely gone it does feel very out of place. The ending also rivals Pieces and Deadly Blessing for out-of-nowhere ending stingers. It’s a very strange movie, but it’s worth seeing at least once.

Mother’s Day (2010)

Mother’s Day 2010 is about a group of friends in their 30s and 40s having a party in a Kansas suburb when Ike, Addley, and a whole bunch of other characters who aren’t important. There’s a ton of characters here so it’s pretty obvious that the bulk of them are grist for the mill.

Mother (Rebecca De Mornay) shows up and she and Shawn Ashmore are really the only bright lights worth watching. That’s not to say that the other actors are bad, the entire production is quite excellent, but this is the sort of movie that’s just an exercise in wallowing in human misery for no discernible reason. It doesn’t even serve as a commentary on the random pointlessness of violence because it’s a movie that’s about class struggle and the late 2000s housing crisis, but the victims of this narrative are the people murdering and torturing these people in a basement, so fuck them and any attempt at making us feel bad for them.

De Mornay plays a sort of personable psychopath, she’s friendly and reassuring but her dedication to her shitty adult children involves ruthlessly murdering people for not following instructions and at one point threatening one of the women (a character who the movie really wants us to understand is the slut of the group) to have sex with her gut-shot teenage son so he won’t die a virgin. Shawn Ashmore is the one human and moral character in the movie and in any other movie he’d be the hero but if you’ve seen Shawn Ashmore movies then you know he has worse odds than Sean Bean.

Is it a good remake?

I’m just gonna come out and say it, it’s not a remake. There are characters named Ike and Addley, there’s an overbearing mother figure who serves as the primary villain, Addley makes a reference to hating disco, and there’s reference to a boogeyman figure in Mother’s sister Queenie. These are the only ties to the original film, nothing else has anything to do with the Troma movie. I’m perplexed why this was even sold as a remake since the original doesn’t exactly have big name value.

Does it stand on its own?

I have a complicated relationship with Darren Lynn Bousman. On one hand he directed probably the two best Saw sequels (Saw II and Saw IV) and the worst one (Saw III) and I like the concept and aesthetic of Repo! The Genetic Opera but not so much the music or the movie itself. Most of Bousman’s films are just ugly and mean-spirited in a way that’s neither enjoyable nor poignant, I hate using this kind of reductive language but the man makes misery porn and I have no idea why anyone would want to watch it. He can make a movie look very good and he’s good at selecting actors and just giving his films a layer of polish but they’re just manipulatively mean-spirited, and this one is just a roller coaster ride built to raise your hopes and then dash them before your eyes, culminating in an ending that made me audibly exlaim “Ohhh, fuck you!" at the screen. These sorts of movies have their defenders but I’m not among them, I do not care for this movie and I really don’t want to ever watch it again.

Watch, Toss, or Buy?

Personally, it’s a toss but it’s well-made enough that I think for most people it’s worth a watch.