|
Mother's Day
| Released |
10 June 2011 |
| Director |
Darren Lynn Bousmann |
| Starring |
Rebecca De Mornay, Jamie King |
| Writer(s) |
Scott Milam |
Producer(s)
|
Brett Ratner, Richard Saperstein, Jay Stern, Brian Witten |
| Origin |
United States |
| Running Time |
112 minutes |
| Genre |
Horror, thriller |
| Rating |
18 |
|
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Having a bad day.
Mother’s Day is a romantic comedy from the makers of the film Valentine’s Day, following the lives of several mother and child groups. It shows the ungrateful children gradually realising the influence their mothers had on their lives and coming to finally appreciate them in the lead up to Mother’s Day. Not really though, despite the fact that this is the first image that came into my head when I heard the title, this is actually a gritty horror/thriller from the director of the Saw franchise. Seriously.
Mother’s Day is a remake of the 1980 exploitation flick of the same name, but thankfully only the name and the very basic elements of the plot remain. The updated version sees three sons on the run from the law return to their mother’s house to hide out, only to discover that their mother (Deborah Ann Woll from True Blood) has been evicted and the house is now occupied by a group of friends celebrating the new owner’s birthday. The sons do the obvious thing here, take the group hostage, tie them up in the basement and call their mom to come pick them up. The plot doesn’t really have much more to it than that. The whole movie soon descends into the ridiculous as the psychotic mother and her weirdly devoted sons inexplicably attempt to intimidate the new owners into giving them the money they need to make their getaway by a variety of mind games and torture. While this might have made a tense and gripping experience under certain circumstances, the fact that characters are plain and unlikeable pretty much undermines any impact of Mother’s Day.
What is surprising about Mother’s Day is the fact that despite a lack of decent plot or well rounded characters, some scenes do possess a real element of tension. Director Darren Lynn Bousman manages to provide some real edge of the seat moments, which is a particularly impressive achievement given that you shouldn’t care what happens to these uninteresting characters. If a traditional suspense horror creates tension by placing characters the audience cares about in harms way, Mother’s Day does the exact opposite– it takes boring protagonists, who are too unlikeable for anyone to care if they live or die, and somehow manages to create tension anyway. This is either a great achievement in cinematography or a massive flaw at the heart of a rather poor film, I can’t decide. Either way I think I would have preferred the romantic comedy.
- Bernard O’Rourke |
