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Mother’s Day (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2010)
Without a doubt, Rebecca De Mornay’s performance is
Mother’s Day’s greatest asset.
Channeling a demented caricature of Hillary Clinton, she uses cruel logic to
entrap characters in their own tricks and turn the supposedly civilized suburb
dwellers against one another. She commands the screen whenever she’s on it,
leveraging her twisted family values into an outright reign of terror. The
slightly campy pitch of her outsized performance keeps the rest of the film from
feeling as vicious as it otherwise might, and gives what it is an otherwise
routine hostage film a distinctive hook. As the stakes are raised in
Mother’s Day, and the characters
begin to behave more rashly, the level of excitement only increases. By the
film’s climax, it’s laid waste to the majority of its cast, which will repulse
some viewers, but stand as something of an attraction to others. For those who
lie in the latter camp, Mother’s Day
comes recommended. Its blood-soaked shamelessness invigorates what would
otherwise be a routine thriller. 53 Jeremy Heilman 06.15.11
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Darren
Lynn Bousman, director of Saw II
through IV, makes a change in his
chosen genre if not exactly a change in tone, with his new thriller
Mother’s Day, a remake of the 1980
Troma cult classic. Both preposterously plotted and, given its crude nature,
preposterously entertaining, the film begins on site at a young couple’s
homecoming party. Having moved into a foreclosed house, this duo and a
collection of their friends soon finds themselves with some unwelcome visitors.
It turns out that this new home once belonged to the aptly named Koffin family,
a motley group of bank robbers, led by a cruel but businesslike matriarch
(Rebecca De Mornay). After a botched heist, the Koffins scamper back to their
nest, holding the party guests hostage in an extended, sadistic home invasion.
The director’s experience in the torture porn genre comes in handy here, as the
criminals inflict a series of perverse punishments upon their captives, which
inevitably are repaid back in double on the oppressors. As plausibility goes
straight out the window, mining tension out of the increasingly ridiculous
scenario becomes Bousman’s goal. Mother’s
Day succeeds admirably on that level, delaying any inevitable moral
reckoning in the name of further exploitation.