On Mother’s Day, online sites delight in posting lists of the worst movie mothers…they’re usually all the same suspects- Mommie Dearest, Carrie, Precious, Friday The 13th, Throw Momma From the Train, Psycho, etc. But mothers can be even more complicated and scary, especially in movies. Here are some diabolical maternal examples in cinema that often get left out. Feel free to add to the list.
Ma Mere. Tousle-haired beauty Louis Garrel (The Dreamers) plays the unfortunate son in this outrageous shocker directed by Christophe Honore and based on a novel by George Bataille. Vacationing with mom (Isabelle Huppert) in the Canary Islands they receive word that dad has died and mom takes it on herself not merely to corrupt her son’s morals with her hedonistic lifestyle- but strip mine his soul as well. Joan Crawford may have been a terror- but she never egged on her girlfriend to rim her son while she watched. You’ve got to hand it to the astonishing Isabelle Huppert– she’s utterly fearless.
Only God Forgives. Boy, did this movie get unfairly trashed by critics. Perhaps it was backlash for great reviews director Nicolas Winding Refn received for his earlier film Drive. This movie also stars Ryan Gosling but it’s intentionally stylized, almost to a fault, and its craziness and ultra-violence rubbed critics the wrong way. Kristin Scott Thomas plays Crystal. the monstrous drug-lord mother who flies to Bangkok when her son Billy is murdered. Ryan Gosling plays Julian, Billy’s brother who runs a kick-boxer club, who explains to his mother, “he was killed because he raped and killed a 16-year-old girl.” “I’m sure he had his reasons,” his mother calmly replies. Hell bent on revenge she paints the already red-looking movie crimson with bloody revenge. Kristin Scott Thomas plays it so amoral and vicious she’s a blast. When Julian brings a girl to meet his mom at a restaurant, Crystal asks her, “And how many cocks can you entertain with that cute little cum-dumpster of yours?”
Suddenly, Last Summer. Tennessee Williams’ controversial play gets an all-star movie treatment and amazingly got released at the time considering the lurid subject matter. Katharine Hepburn is sensational as the wealthy, imperious Violet Venable, whose beloved poet son Sebastian died in Mexico under mysterious circumstances. She greets guests in an overgrown hothouse garden of carnivorous plants, Sebastian’s widow- Catherine (a gorgeous Elizabeth Taylor) has been institutionalized ever since his death, her brain blocking out what actually happened, and Violet is dead-set on coaxing Catherine’s doctor (Montgomery Clift) into giving her a lobotomy. Hepburn has to be the meanest fag hag in all cinema. Stylishly directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, with a sardonic screenplay by Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams.
Wild At Heart. Fabulously deranged David Lynch film, based on a Barry Gifford novel and starring Nicolas Cage as Sailor, just out of jail and reunited with his great love Lula (Laura Dern). They jump in a car and head for California but Lula’s monster mother Marietta (a wickedly amusing Diane Ladd) pays some goons to have Sailor killed. There are moments of such wonderful craziness in this movie, including Nicolas Cage’s exuberant Elvis interpretation. Diane Ladd’s vengeful mom, swilling martinis and smearing red lipstick across her face is like a mix between a Tennessee Williams character and a Disney cartoon villain.
Ma Barker’s Killer Brood. Long before Shelley Winters got to chew up the countryside in Roger Corman’s great Bloody Mama, Lureen Tuttle (the sheriff’s wife, and voice of “mother,” in Psycho) played the maniacal real-life crime matriarch, Ma Barker, who during the 1930, with her sons, blazed a lawless path across America, and whose words of wisdom to her kids were: “Don’t get caught!” “She taught and trained her four sons to be criminals!” screamed the ads of this low-budget 1960 gem. After one of her sons (My Three Sons Don Grady) plays violin during a church service she snarls back, “Nothing disgusts me more than a sissy.” Then she goes on to praise her other children from stealing from the collection plate. You really owe it to yourself to seek out this film just for Lurene Tuttle’s hilarious, full-tilt performance.
The Grifters. Anjelica Huston gives a memorably hard-boiled portrait of rottenness right up there with Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and Ann Savage in Detour. She plays Lilly, the mother of small-time grifter Roy (John Cusack), whose girlfriend Myra (Annette Bening) is constantly trying to rope Roy into bigger illegal schemes. Lilly works the racetrack for the mob and is uneasily trying to re-enter her son’s life. Director Stephen Frears does a great job adapting Jim Thompson’s bleak novel, and Huston is remarkably chilling. When she stands banging on the down button on the elevator outside her son’s hospital room, you literally jump in your seat.
Santa Sangre. Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo) based this berserk tale on an actual murder case, and starred his own son (Axel Jodorowsky) as Fenix, raised in the circus by an armless, religious fanatic of a mother (Blanca Guerra). She lost her arms when she threw acid on the crotch of her circus, knife-thrower, husband, catching him in bed with the tattooed lady. He retaliated by slicing off her limbs. Fenix performs for his mother, using his arms to replace hers in a bizarre stage act, and after years of absorbing his mother’s hatred, begins killing woman and burying them in the backyard.
Luna. The kind of preposterous fiasco only a great director like Bernardo Bertolucci could perpetrate. Jill Clayburgh was a wonderful actress but it’s a stretch to imagine her as the world-famous opera singer Caterina, performing in Rome while her precocious 15-year-old son Joe (Matthew Barry) runs wild, skateboarding around the city having sex and doing drugs. Caterina may be a great singer but she’s too self-involved to be a good mother- she forgets Joe’s birthday, scores heroin for him, masturbates him, and even makes out with him. The cinematography by Vittorio Storaro is rapturous, though- a sequence where Joe and an Italian girl make love in a movie theater showing Niagara is glorious. A ludicrously self-indulgent mess.
Frightmare. British director Peter Walker did a series of films in the 1970s that were ferociously brilliant. This is one of my favorites, about a devoted daughter- Jackie (Deborah Fairfax), whose parents (Sheila Keith and Rupert Davies) have just been released from prison for a cannibalistic murder but still haven’t given up their craving for snacking on human flesh. Walker used the actress Sheila Keith in many of his films and she is always amazing, but here she is just terrifying. The sight of her using her tarot readings to lull her victims into a false sense of security, and then dispatching them with fire pokers, electric drills and pitchforks, still chills the blood.
We Need To Talk About Kevin. Lynne Ramsay’s disturbingly lyrical film based on Lionel Shriver’s harrowing book. Tilda Swinton plays Eva, whose teenage son Kevin (an electrifying Ezra Miller) has committed a Columbine-like massacre at his high school. No one speaks to Eva at work. She gets attacked by strangers on the street. Her house is frequently splattered with paint. At night, she lies alone on the couch drinking wine and popping pills, flashing back to the evolution of her poisonous relationship with her son, and the crushing guilt of the consequences.
Ordinary People. Robert Redford directed this drama of an Illinois family suffering the loss of a favorite son, and the psychological scars left on the remaining boy Conrad (Timothy Hutton), who attempts suicide and still is rebuffed by his chilly, emotionally detached mother (Mary Tyler Moore). It was such a brilliant idea to cast TVs beloved “Mary” as this remote mom and she really dug into the role, bravely creating an unlikable but frightening believable character.
The Girl Next Door. I so miss the late author Jack Ketchum. Mostly dismissed as a “splatterpunk” writer- his books (like The Lost and Off Season) have savage power, not only to shock, but to inflame the brain. This book was based on a true crime that happened in Indiana in 1965. In the film, two orphaned teenage girls- Meg (Blythe Auffarth) and disabled Susan (Madeline Taylor) and are sent to live with their Aunt Ruth (Blanche Baker) and her sons. What transpires is that Ruth encourages her sons, and some neighborhood children, to abuse Meg, who they chain up in in their basement. It frighteningly escalates to sexual abuse, even carving obscene words into her skin. Finally murder. It’s unimaginably brutal and heartbreaking, as a film and as a crime.
Inside. Nightmarish French shocker by directors Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo. After a car accident that leaves her boyfriend dead, a traumatized and very pregnant photographer Sarah (Alysson Paradis) decides to spend Christmas eve alone at her remote house. That is until a strange woman (Beatrice Dalle) shows up banging at her door ferociously trying to get in. She’s not Santa. Like a Grimm fairy gone berserk, the film is awash in blood and gore. Beatrice Dalle (Betty Blue) is absolutely terrifying as the scissors-wielding womb raider mom, and she cuts such a frightening figure in the film she freezes your blood.
The Baby. A twisted 1973 treat about a man-hating mama (Ruth Roman) who keeps her mentally-challenged teenage son in diapers and in a playpen. A social worker (Anjanette Comer) is determined to free “Baby” from Mom, and her two psycho daughters (Marianna Hill & Susanne Zenor), even resorting to murder to do so. This film, directed by Ted Post, straddles the bad-taste fence and then joyously leaps off and has one of the most surprisingly warped endings ever.
Dead Alive. Way before The Lord Of The Rings films Peter Jackson directed this living-dead splatter comedy. Set in the 1950s, poor Lionel’s (Timothy Balme) mother (Elizabeth Moody) gets bitten by a Sumatran rat monkey at a local zoo, which transforms her into a puss-oozing predatory monster. The dutiful son keeps her chained up in the cellar, but she keeps getting loose, infecting others and before long there’s a cellar-full of zombies. By the end of the movie Lionel is fighting off an army of living dead with an upraised lawn mower and mom has grown into a giant marauding monster.
You’ll like My Mother. Above average 1972 suspense film, well directed by Lamont Johnson, starring Patty Duke as the very pregnant wife of a soldier killed in Vietnam who travels to frigid Minnesota to meet her mother-in-law (Rosemary Murphy) for the first time only to get snowed in with the surprisingly hateful woman and a psycho/rapist nephew (Richard Thomas). Her only ally is a mentally challenged girl (excellent Sian Barbara Allen).
Savage Grace. Tom Kalin’s (Swoon) taste for transgressive tales continues with this perverse true crime saga of Barbara Baekeland (Julianne Moore), the wealthy, beautiful, troubled wife of Brooks Baekeland (Stephen Dillane), the heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune. When Brooks left his wife for another woman, mother and son traveled around Europe and entered into an incestuous relationship which ended in murder. Julianne Moore gives a brave, fierce performance as the defiantly disturbed Barbara- there are scenes where she flares up at a dinner party and at the airport that are frighteningly revealing and exquisitely acted. Eddie Redmayne is quite wonderful as the poor doomed Tony. He has the right prissy, privileged, attitude with that slight hint of decadence that makes the movie so sublimely twisted.
Mother! Darren Aronofsky’s allegorical horror movie starring his-then girlfriend Jennifer Lawrence as “Mother,” a woman living with a poet with writer’s block- “Him” (Javier Bardem) in a rambling remote house. Some strangers show up (Ed Harris & Michelle Pfeiffer) and end up as house guests, much to “Mother’s” annoyance. Thank God- because Harris & Pfeiffer are the only fun in this dour, pretentious mess. Eventually “Mother” gets pregnant and gives birth while the house is over-run with “Him” fans and when she falls asleep the baby is passed around the crowd until the neck snaps and when “Mother” wakes she discovers them eating the baby. Not much of a “Mother” is she? I have to admit I had more fun watching the movie then those around me, but it ended the relationship between the director and star and was truly hated by most audiences. The NY Times touted it as a “comedy,” but that had to be a prank.
What a great list!