Entry 115: Mother's Day (1980)

 Mother's Day (1980)

Dir: Charles Kaufman

"I'm so proud of my boys...They never forget their mama."

 

Yeah, I'm a couple days late on this entry in particular, and a couple weeks late on a new entry in general.  It's been a LONG couple of weeks, and in addition to some craziness at work, I've been sleeping like complete shit and am very, VERY tired.  So if I can't muster my usual sleazy enthusiasm for this film, know that I enjoyed it very much.

In a pre-credits sequence,  a couple of dirty Moonies are slaughtered by two mentally-deficient rednecks and their leering, elderly mother after attending a self-help seminar. We're then introduced to the "Rat Pack," a trio of late-20s former college roommates who reunite once a year for a long weekend getaway.  There's street smart, spunky Jackie (Deborah Luce), the defacto leader of the group, spoiled Beverly Hills socialite Trina (Tiana Pierce) and mousy wallflower Abbey (Nancy Hendrickson).  The ladies decide to spend this year's getaway camping in rural New Jersey, where they're set upon by the terrible trio from the prologue: Mother (Beatrice Pons, from the TV series The Phil Silvers Show and Car 54, Where are You?) and her seemingly-inbred, dim-witted sons Ike (Frederick Coffin, Hard to Kill, Wayne's World) and Addley (Michael McCleery, L.A. Confidential, Joy Ride).  The ladies are hauled back to the demented family's run-down, kitschy Americana-filled shack, where Trina and Abbey are restrained and Jackie is forced to act in a demented play before being beaten and raped by Addley for mother's pleasure.  Trina and Abbey manage to escape their bonds and locate Jackie just in time for her to succumb to her injuries.  With the most capable member of their group gone, meek Abbey and sheltered Trina tap into their inner savagery to exact bloody revenge on their tormentors.

Mother's Day is one helluva movie.  Released during the very beginning of the slasher boom, it does feature a few tropes from that soon to be ubiquitous genre, but it owes much more to rape-revenge flicks like The Last House on the Left and I Spit on your Grave or even the civilized city dweller vs savage country folk theme of Peckinpah's Straw Dogs.  Director Kaufman (brother of Lloyd, who produced this with his longtime partner Michael Hurtz pre-Troma), however, establishes a lightness of tone that keeps it from wallowing in the unpleasantness of those films.  I wouldn't call the film a "horror comedy," as that calls to mind either parody (Student Bodies), over-the-top cartoonishness (Evil Dead 2, Braindead) or near-masturbatory salf-congratulatory "cleverness (Scream and anything else written by Kevin Williamson)," but Kaufman deploys a series of bizarre non-sequiturs (the aforementioned self-help seminar, the doorman who screams at Jackie "I'll never have a free weekend as long as I'm a black man in America!" as she wishes him well on her way out of town) that give the film an absurdist edge, as if reminding us we shouldn't take any of this too terribly seriously.  He also keeps the most brutal scenes short or off-camera.  Perhaps Kaufman's greatest strength, however, is his three unknown female leads; they're all FANTASTIC and have wonderful chemistry together, and I'm disappointed that none of them went on to fruitful acting careers.  In fact, the film spends nearly forty minutes with the Rat Pack before they're abducted, allowing us to get to know and like them before the horror sets in.  That's a goddamn effective tool!  Mother's Day is a real under-the-radar treat; don't miss it!