Mother's Day (1980) review

 

MOTHER'S DAY (1980)

Holden McGuire (Ike), Billy Ray McQuade (Addley), Rose Ross (Mother), Nancy Hendrickson (Abbey), Deborah Luce (Jackie), Tiana Pierce (Trina)

Directed by Charles Kaufman

The Short Version: Charles Kaufman's rape-revenge flick moonlights as a wittily well acted TEXAS CHAINSAW styled horror with a slash of jet black humor. The veritable cherry on top for this banana split of backwoods barbarity is a Romeroesque subtext and flurries of product placement for the feral family with everything. The plot of this Geek show spectacle is simple, yet the script is astonishingly rich in exposition. Essentially an old lady trains her neolithic sons to torture and kill anyone they can get their hands on. Two city women prove problematic when they turn the tables on their attackers leading to unique usage of a can of Drano, a TV set, and a conveniently placed booby balloon.

A trio of former college roommates get together annually for a weekend getaway; this particular year, a fateful camping trip in New Jersey's Deep Barons is chosen. What they don't know is that living within the woods is a demented elderly woman who trains her two sadistic sons to rape, assault, and kill anyone who stumbles into their isolated domain. 

The notorious I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1978) is the prime example of the rape-revenge movies, a genre style that is often viewed primarily as misogynist trash exploiting violence towards women; the argument usually being the revenge is never as thorough as the violence that leads to it. MOTHER'S DAY (1980) is of a similar vintage -- and the revenge is very sweet when it comes -- but it does quite a bit more with the material than mere exploitation. 

 
There are a number of disturbing sequences that rival the goriest violence seen today; and not because they're overly bloody, just the tone is particularly unwholesome. That some of these sequences are laced with black humor makes them even more unpleasant. In some instances (such as the brothers arguing over their musical styles), this humor is genuinely funny. But for those moments such as when they bicker over which mock stage play to perform that will end in violence and rape, the humor is a bit more uncomfortable to laugh at. However, the temptation to snigger at Ike's face lighting up when his murderous mama asks him to retrieve the camera responding with, "I'll get the Kodak!" is hard to contain.

Speaking of child-like wonder, after capturing the three women, the two mad brothers act like giddy children on Christmas morning, "Can we open'em now, Ma... can we open'em now?!" They treat the ladies like living toys; not just to be played with, but to be beaten, raped, and humiliated all for the enjoyment of their dementedly domineering mother who has a front row seat to the savagery.

As uncouth as they are, there's an attempt -- twisted though it may be -- to assimilate with normalcy by way of a heavily deformed nuclear family axiom. They may eat their breakfast from buckets (which consists of Trix cereal, Gerber baby food, cheese spread, and Quik chocolate powder!), and act with all the social graces of a razorback, but they believe themselves to be modernized; or "citified", as we're told by Ike in vehement response to Trina's reference to them as "Backwoods, perverted pieces of shit". 

Submerged in television and mountains of product placement, this noxious family of sadists live their lives like a reverse MY THREE SONS; in this case it's two sons, and the matriarch is in charge. Much like those old TV shows, this fractured family unit live their lives like a situational comedy. But instead of teaching life lessons, these two mental midgets are taught violence, and implementing it in the most reprehensible ways imaginable. Victims are toyed with, ie tortured, chased, and hunted via an assortment of games derived from the twisted mind of Mother.

 
While we're on the subject of product placement, MOTHER'S DAY wallows in it. Once the action shifts to rural locales, virtually every scene has some sort of brand name, or household trinkets dressing up the scene in some way. There's an homage to DELIVERANCE (1972) when the girls pull up to a general store (doubling as a post office) a short distance before their final destination. The homage is two boys playing banjos (see pic above); but aside from that, there's both a Coke and Pepsi machine and a coat rack adorned with garden implements! The house of the killers is an all-out smorgasbord of advertising for any number of household items, edibles, and periodicals. Every celluloid nook and cranny is crammed with some type of scenic accouterments. Home Shopping Club was just around the corner so one can only imagine how these feral pack rats would have reacted. Further, this is probably the one time Steve Reeves and Deborah Harry of Blondie "appear" onscreen together.

 

Additionally, Kaufman's script does fantastic things with his female protagonists. For all the critical crap slung at this movie, there's more going on here than your average slasher opus. There are some striking role reversals that take place over the course of the film. Trina, the wealthy California girl has no qualms about getting her hands dirty; Chicago denizen Abbey is the bespectacled, meek girl dealing with mother issues of her own; New Yorker Jackie is a professional woman who's a magnet for scummy men who see her as a pushover. As MOTHER'S DAY progresses, Trina, who comes off the strongest, ultimately becomes weak; Abbey the meek inherits the strength Trina is drained of; and Jackie stays the same -- succumbing to the same fate out in the woods that she endured with regularity in the big city -- the difference being her treatment by these psychotic forest dwellers proves fatal.

On a side note concerning Abbey -- an early scene shows her to share a similar relationship with her own mother that parallels the one of the two maniacal sons. At the end of the film, she gets to release her own violent urges towards her mother -- transferring them to the predatory mama by way of a sex toy in the shape of a pair of breasts. Charles Kaufman left no sleazy stone unturned for this movie.

If MOTHER'S DAY can be condemned for anything at all, it's for being partially responsible for inspiring Rob Zombie to make movies; or more accurately, for RZ to make the same movie over and over again. Badly. TCM is an obvious inspiration for his two Firefly films, but his forceful intent to make us feel for his killers is more in line with the Deep Barons (really the Pine Barrens) dwelling miscreants of MOTHER'S DAY; only Kaufman's script handles his characters with far more professionalism, not to mention giving them better dialog. 

Regarding Hooper's classic, Mother and her two boys are a mirror image of the three brothers of TEXAS CHAINSAW. Both sets of feral families reside in playfully hostile environments located in rural isolation. Both the eldest brother in TCM, and the mother in MOTHER'S DAY are able to blend into normal society, using it as a means of luring victims to their doom -- the gas station in CHAINSAW and the mother's attendance of motivational classes!

Kaufman gives them a history, or at least enough of one for us to know there's an entire lineage to this sick, twisted bloodline. The one family member that's periodically teased (but not seen till the end) is Queenie; a character that, by dropping bits of information here and there builds a modicum of suspense that allows the movie to close out on a marvelous final shock moment before the end credits roll. Queenie is the animalistic sister of our title head of household. Banished to the wilderness for her inhuman characteristics, the sons believe Queenie to be dead as evidenced by a rotting severed ear they keep in a box! Queenie is very much alive, though, and possesses an even lower level of social mores to her deranged sibling and her two sons. Whether intentional, or inadvertently so, Queenie is this films Jersey Devil, a folkloric monster said to inhabit New Jersey's Pine Barrens.

With this sort of subject matter, you'd think the crew would be hard pressed to find actors to participate; particularly to act for free, which some of them did! Unusual for this sort of low budget picture, the acting is fantastic for the main participants. Everyone gives it their all, and going overboard at all the right moments. They're so into it, and some of the situations so disturbing, a few of the actors didn't use their real names. Holden McGuire, the rotted-toothed, white-eyed crazy with the Warner Bros cartoon voice was really Frederick Coffin; Billy Ray McQuade, the muscular, weasel-like rapist is actually Michael McCleery; and most surprising of all is Rose Ross as Mother, who was Beatrice Pons, a familiar face from such well known television programs like THE PHIL SILVERS SHOW (1956-1959) and CAR 54, WHERE ARE YOU? (1961-1963).

Pons apparently, and understandably took issue with some of the sequences (such as the rape scene), refusing to be present, despite her characters lingering desire to witness her sons destroy their victims. Obviously it's her during the opening, and thoroughly vicious attack on a couple of hippies. Seeing her cheering on her sons as they decapitate the man and mercilessly pound the woman's face into mush is extremely disturbing, successfully setting the proper mood for the slog ahead. For those with weak constitutions, this pre-credits sequence lets you know just what sort of film you're in for.

MEMORIES OF MOTHER'S DAY

The first time I ever saw sight of MOTHER'S DAY was in Fangoria magazine. There was something about that morbid depiction of Americana (the Whistler's Mother painting) on the poster advertising that drew my young eyes to it. However, at that time there was a better chance of me seeing Hell freeze over than to ever see this movie. Around this time, I ran across a delightfully scathing review of the film in a Roger Ebert review book that only made me want to see it more. After years of searching all video stores within a 40 mile radius, the chance of finding my holy grail of horror (along with MOTEL HELL after becoming entranced with the chainsaw pig) drew dimmer and dimmer. There was this one video store in town -- The Video Station -- that specialized in virtually every weird movie made up to that time, and even they didn't have MOTHER'S DAY. Around 1986 another video store opened up (the third in town) named Adventure Video. Having had no luck anywhere else, I figured this fairly small rental store wedged between a hair salon and The Pizza Station wouldn't have what I was looking for, either. Still, the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to go there. A year later, I talked my step-mother into taking me by there. To my amazement, not only did they have MOTHER'S DAY, but they had the other prize, MOTEL HELL as well! I had to watch MD in secret, and upon my grandmother quizzing me as to what it was about, I had to make up a story because I'd of gotten some "Peach Tree Tea"; which were self-picked switches from the Peach tree for wearing out your buttocks had she known what it was I was watching. Needless to say, Adventure Video became a hot spot for me, the impressionable 12 year old that I was. After school, I would often ride my bike up there and hang out having made friends with the few folks that ran the place. And over time, managed to score dozens of horror posters, a VHS of KRULL (1983), and some movie promotional materials including a Jason mask for FRIDAY 7 (1987), and a giant standee of Leatherface atop a mound of skulls for TCM 2 (1986).

United Film Distribution (UFD), the company that handled some of George Romero's movies, opened MOTHER'S DAY in 93 theaters beginning in New York where it reportedly became a quick crowd pleaser. The film eventually made enough money to find a spot on Variety's top independent grossers list. When UFD went out of business in the late 1980s, Kaufman's movie was picked up by Troma. Both Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz were Associate Producers on the picture, but it was not a Troma financed production.

Charles Kaufman's tale of motherly love has grown in appreciation over the years. It's gone from Geek show mentality to subversive horror with subtextual meaning. The film seems to have many fans, and enough to have warranted a remake in 2010. The updated MOTHER'S DAY transplanted the rural setting to a suburban one. Considering its pedigree, it was a reasonable assumption the new film would not be granted a wide release although it's saddening that it didn't. Surprisingly well made, it pays respectable tribute to the original while expanding on its themes. As for the original, it retains its quirkiness that has acted as a beacon in widening its fan base, as well as keeping itself a warm seat nestled within the cult film continuum. 

This review is representative of the Anchor Bay Blu-ray.