And speaking of mommy issues…
Mom (1990) is one for the late-night degenerates and cable creepers – the weirdos who stuck around channel surfing on school nights looking for low budget schlock value and vile thrills. It’s also an obscure little title that always seemed to stalk video store bottom shelves like a… big hairy stalking thing.
Mom’s a monster movie with baggage, a hybrid of werewolf and vampire flick that reeks of Bengay and Polident, but likes to keep the plastic on the furniture.
For the uninitiated, a mild-mannered son lets his sweet elderly mum take in a stranger who turns out to be a flesh-eating shapeshifter. Mom gets bit. Then things go bad.
Jeanne Bates stars as the titular matriarch, and you also get a bit of Art Evans and Claudia Christian, not to mention a brilliantly on-point Brion James gnawing at every scene. It’s got soft shades of Dead Alive and The Granny, but the budget had the FX crew cutting corners with expired lunch meat and extra red dye in the Karo syrup.
Still, you get a few sloppy seconds.
There’s some dark comedy peeking at the roots, but it takes its die job very seriously. It plays Mom as a monster, Mom as a victim, Mom as momma’s boy hangup – it’s all uncomfortably funny and also a little bit sad. Not only is she turning into something inhuman, she’s regressing, and her son can’t stop enabling her.
It’s a twisted family drama in a loose pulpy skin suit.
Mom takes its time getting there, and it stops to water the plants, but it’s deftly directed. The whole production has the feel of a Terms of Endearment TV spin-off – if it got hijacked by Mick Garris. Which is my shorthand for saying it’s sorta great.
It’s a movie you didn’t so much seek out as stumble across – wedged between dusty old horror big boxes or playing at 2:45 AM on a station you didn’t know was on the dial. Half the time you’re watching, you’ll be pinching yourself expecting to wake up.
I love Mom for all its worth, it’s a movie that does what it does for your own good, and it belongs on the shelf somewhere between Basket Case and Vampire’s Kiss. -Pop