Bloody Mama
Bloody Mama is a mildly entertaining piece of 70’s exploitation trash from the man himself Roger Corman. If you’ve seen a Corman film before then you know what your expecting. Sex, violence and usually a plot device to entice viewers to pay money to see his film. This film is no different. The plot is supposedly based on true events although how much is based in actual facts I’m doubtful. The story is pretty simple. It revolves around four grown brothers and they’re overprotective mother played by Shelly Winters. The family is hit hard during the depression in the deep south and begin to commit small robberies to for money. Two of the brothers are caught and sent to jail.
Thats when Mama decides to take matters into her own hands and hold up a bank to get enough money to get a lawyer to get her boys out of jail. Mama manages to get her boys back with her but now they’re on the run from the law and her boys continue to get in more and more trouble including raping women, murdering and more stealing. Everything comes to a head when they are surrounded by police and trapped inside a farm house. In classic grindhouse fashion there is a ten minute showdown where the bullets, blood and tears fly. There really isn’t that much of a story to the film it just kind of moves along until the ending which even though it was predictable, it was still at least somewhat satisfying. The main problem for me though was how tame the film was which I’ve always though is one of Cormans biggest problems. For a film like this it just didn’t try hard enough to be shocking or sleazy, instead it came off as lifeless and felt like just another average film for Corman.
At times I thought the film was going to veer off into the tasteless category. Such as the hints of incest or the implied gang rapes. Don’t get me wrong I don’t think those types of things are alright to have in a movie but if your going to watch a restricted grindhouse film then you do sort of expect to see things like that. One reason it could have been so tame was the fact that it did have a reasonably known cast at the time. Shelly Winters of course headlined the cast and delivered a perfectly over the top campy performance that was hands down the best part of the film. It really seemed like she was having fun in the film and never seemed out of place, whether it was holding a machine gun in a bank robbery or singing a hymn to her boys, she always stole the scene. The rest of the cast including her boys did a good job as well but the one stand out in the group would have to be an early performance by Robert De Niro who played the drugged out mentally disturbed son.
For the first hour or so of the film he hardly had any scenes and was somewhat overlooked but in the second half of the film he has one scene in particular that was excellent and was actually almost heartbreaking and was really the only scene in the film that had any true emotion. Production values, stunts and effects were fairly well done too. Especially considering that the budget was surly another tight one over seen by Corman himself. That is one thing that I doubt anyone could argue about is that Corman knows how to shot a film for nearly nothing and every penny is put on screen. This of course means that as always there is the random stock footage this time of the depression era that actually fit alright into the film. Overall if your looking for a grindhouse film this isn’t nearly one of the best but it is fairly entertaining if not a little tame and slow in parts but it’s certainly not one of Corman’s worse and the acting is very good. Worth a rent
RELATED POSTS:
- Carver Movie Review Carver is one of those films that really does a couple things right...
- DePalma Helming Boston Stranglers Brian DePalma has already tackled the story of The Black Dahlia, now he...
- Lucio Fulci’s ‘The Beyond’ finally to DVD Italian Master of Horror Lucio Fulci left us several genre classics, his...
- An American Haunting Trailer Based on true events that took place in Tennessee during the 1800s, where...
- Psycho Special Edition DVD Art and Specs From Universal we have the specs and DVD art for the upcoming re-release...
- DiCaprio Looking to Raise Twilight Zone Leonardo DiCaprio is not the kind of guy you would think has a passion for...
No Comments
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
