Your Mother's like A Doorknob...Everyone Gets A Turn!

Going into Mother's Day, my expectations were meek at best, and it being a Lloyd Kaufman production didn't help all that much either. As a genre film fan, I have a lot of love and respect for what Lloyd Kaufman does and has done in the past, but I still think a bulk of the films (mainly newer) are let downs even in terms of the Troma type quality of movie making. Mother's Day is actually directed by Lloyd's very own brother from the very same mother, Charles Kaufman, who hasn't had quite as much as Lloyd in terms of movie credits, but has done some film work.

I figured Mother's Day would be another one of those cheap holiday themed Slasher films that were the hot thing at the time, but the film turns out to be more of a spoof of the Slasher genre. At least for the first half that is, which would be the most logical place to start. With a silly, but pretty cool opening double death scene involving expendable characters, Mother's Day moves right on into introducing you to the three main female protagonists of the film. Their introduction is actually done in a clever way with it being the credits doubling as a slide show and voice over of the three girls (who refer to themselves as the Rat Pack?!) talking about all the fun they had in college together, how they will forever need to keep in touch, and wonder where they might be in another ten years. Segue into the present (?) time when we get to meet the three best-est friends living their individual lives as they prepare to once again meet up for a weekend getaway/yearly reunion.

Each one of the ladies has gone completely different ways in life. Trina (Tiana Pierce), is a successful Hollywood starlet which is obvious from her fabulous and extravagant pool party, complete with ladies on roller skates, belly dancers, and a dude passing out after bangin' a rail of coke! Our first awesome impression of Trina is when she says to one of her party helpers,"Tell Joshua to stop jerking off in the kitchen and bring out some ice!" Who beats off in the kitchen when people are around?! Moreover, why on earth would you want them handling ice cubes that could end up in your drink?! Jackie (Deborah Luce) is the working woman with a stay at home, jobless, coke-head, artistic boyfriend that is obviously just using Jackie for a place to crash with the bonus of some occasional intercourse for added scumminess. Though Jackie's meat packer tells her that he is jealous of her structured career claiming it is very difficult for him being so sensitive and filled with so much art, all while he is doing a line…in the morning. Rounding out the tampon trio of women is Abbey (Nancy Hendrickson), a not so old old maid that is very sheltered and controlled by her grumpy bitch ass mother. Nothing funny happens with Abbey and that's probably cause she's a boring girl with nothing coke related going on.

As the girls meet up and head out into the woods for their camping reunion, everything seems to be going as you would expect in a Slasher film, but as I mentioned before, it is with a lot of humor that is very clearly on purpose. There are some funny and very random moments, for example, when Jackie is leaving her apartment complex to meet up with the rest of the Pack, she tells her black doorman to have a nice weekend. He then responds with "how am I supposed to have a nice weekend stuck here in the city?" Jackie's reply to him is "there is plenty to do in New York if you're free for the weekend!" At that point, the doorman gets up and repeatedly yells "free for the weekend…free for the weekend? I'll never be free as long as I'm a Black man in America!" Following the satirical trademarks of Slashers past, the Rat Pack go to pick up some important supplies (aka booze!) at a general store where Jackie tells the country bumpkin store clerk where they are headed. His response is something along the lines of "don't you girls go messin' round up in dem dare woods ya hear!" This is when the rest of the Pack come into the store with "silly and wacky" decorated paper bags over their heads, knocking over a bunch of shit before they take off with out picking up their mess, or even buying anything.

It quickly becomes clear that this so-called Rat Pack is filled with three obnoxious jerks that think they're the shit and they are probably the only ones that think this way. I mean, they call them selves the Rat Pack, but there are only three members?! There might be more than three members of the real Rat Pack that are still alive, than there are in this group of lame droops. There's at least 8 official members of the Brat Pack and a few more that are on the cusp of being down with that hot young gang of troubled teens that were in their 20's. Hell, there has even been 55 members of the Howard Stern Whack Pack for Christ's sake…and those dudes are Whack! What's that say about your crew ladies? Remembering back to a prank the girls pulled on a 38 year old college kid even more shows how cunty these girls are, while also showing yet another example of Mother's Day poking fun at stereotypical Slasher conventions. Jackie (I think), meets up with some dude nicknamed the Dobber (Peter Fox) on a baseball mound for a little late night naughty business. She tells Dobber to get ready while she goes and lets loose the lemonade. He then takes off all his gear, right down to his "gear" and starts doing push ups! All the while, Jackie meets up with the rest of the jerk off girls and they turn on all of the baseball field's lights, exposing the Dobber's Dobber for everyone to see. When I say everyone, I mean all three members of the Rat Pack…because they have no other friends.

That flashback is something that can be found in many a Slasher film, giving a possible motive to a character in the Dobber to possibly seek revenge on the girls for what they had done to him. As stated previously, up until the girls are attacked in the woods, Mother's Day is a flat out lampoon of the genre with random, conventional Slasher situations like the Dobber one, along with some funny POV shots. I was actually quite enjoying the humor as I found it all to be very smart and witty, and I looked forward to what was to come in the second half of the film. Surprisingly enough, the movie takes a bit of a different turn throughout the rest of the film. As the Asshole Pack are out camping they are very suddenly and from straight outta nowhere, attacked by a duo of hillbillies in what is a serious and somewhat frightening fashion.

The Rat Pack are packed up and taken away by the two hillbillies (complete with scissor tattered clothing and all) named Ike (Frederick Coffin) and Addley (Michael McCleery) where they are then brought back to their palacial home in the woods. At some point, the girls are introduced to the leader and birth giver of Ike and Addley, simply known as, Mother (Beatrice Pons). This crazy family is something else for sure; as Mother demands her boys wipe their feet and give mommy a kiss before they show off their freshest female catch. From here on out, Mother's Day is more akin to something like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in tone and feel than it does a straightforward Slasher parody. Slightly mean spirited and exploitative, with a lot less humor, Mother's Days female characters from this point on, are put through a series of torturous situations that are very seriously realised and executed. They are tied up to exercise equipment and are degraded mentally and physically by their antagonists. They are let free at one point, but only to take part in a sadistic mock movie (or a kind of role-play) where the set up results in the raping of one of the females.

While I wouldn't call all of this second half as mean spirited as other movies of this genre type, but it's the humorous first half that misleads and keeps you from being ready for it all when it does go that darker direction. Humor is still there to a point, but that is mostly due to the silliness of the Mother and her two sons who put out fun yet campy performances while still being somewhat menacing. One scene that is just completely outrageous is when Ike and Addley are told by Mother to do their daily training. You are then subjected to a hysterical outdoor workout regimen that consists of watermelon destruction, one-armed push-ups, and smashing the windows in their own house! I can only guess that they are training for a possible attack on their compound, or possibly it is to keep up their strength for when they capture future ladies. But, why they need to break windows in their own house is beyond me…must be mad cold in the wintertime.

What really works in Mother's Day are the performances by the Dickhead Pack themselves. Mother, Ike, and Addley put them through the ringer, as they are continuously beat up and down. You can't help but think they deserve it in a way because of how bad they are as people before they are taken prisoner, like maybe these girls needed to be put through something terrible to kind of put them in their place so they can realize they aren't above or better than everyone else. Keeping from being to spoiler-ish I wont say who, but the girl that was raped during the role play movie scene, is separated from the other two girls. Tired, tattered, and torn, the remaining two girls then devise an escape and rescue plan that leads to a great little scene of self brutality. As the boys are busy play fighting outside, one of the girls gets into a sleeping bag and is lowered out of a window by the other girl so she can come back and unlock the door from the outside. Of course people are pretty friggin heavy and unsurprisingly the boys end up right outside the window resulting in the character gripping the rope for dear life as not to let the hillbilly sons catch them escaping. It's a pretty tense scene and also results in a severely deep rope gash in the girls hand that looked very real and quite painful.

Again, keeping away from spoiler territory, the girls do end up rescuing their friend and then try to find a way to escape to safety. Unfortunately, things do not work out as planned and one of the girls dies causing the other two women to make the decision to go after and take revenge on their one-time captors in honor of their long time friend's death and for what they were put through. It is a nice character arch for the remaining females as they go from one-time bitches that think they are better than everyone else, to finding out that they aren't so above it all when they become the targets of a family of deranged hicks. Eventually they snap out of being helpless victims and go into full on vengeance mode taking things into their own hands. How things pan out from here is for you to find out, but I will say that there is a surprise little ending that I thought was cool, while also keeping up with the humor found in the first portion of the movie.

It seems strange to have a film go from a Slasher spoof to an almost exploitation type of film (which is very similar to what Hostel did 25 years later), but it was a smart decision to have the very funny tongue in cheek first half lead into what is a much more dark second portion of the film. I liked and give credit to the writers and filmmakers of Mother's Day for doing what they did, and I enjoyed how the female characters turned out by the end of the film as I hated these girls from the start, but by time the rape scene happens, you begin to root for them. Acting wise, the girls are great and the family of scrubs are fun to watch as they all put forth good, fitting to their characters performances. My favorite of the deranged duo was Ike played by Frederick Coffin who has done a lot of film and television and is really the only actor outside of Mother herself, Beatrice Pons to have done anything more than a few films. There is a few great death scenes and the film is decently made considering the low budget-ness of it all.

So, if you are looking for something a little different from your average, uncreative, cheap 80's Slasher film, Mother's Day is a good time to be had. To be fair, I don't go into a movie like Mother's Day thinking it's going to be great or that it will be anything outside of a schlock filled, unoriginal good time, and to a point it is those things. However, Mother's Day is at times very funny, with a few smart qualities about it while going a direction I would have never expected it to with the amount of genres it successfully treads upon.