Mother’s Day Massacre (2007)

Directed by Jeff Roenning [Other horror films: N/A]

More than anything else, Mother’s Day Massacre is a mess. The story seems all over the place, and while the movie does have relatively strong, or at least palatable, portions, overall, it’s not what I’d call a fun time.

I think the first time I saw this, I was just confused. The story itself isn’t too hard to follow – a teen and his friends look for his mother in an abandoned town, get attacked by two mentally-challenged hillbilly folk, and the ones that make it out get attacked again once the mother of one of the teens, who is also the mother of the two hillbilly folk, strikes out against the teen’s father in revenge for leaving her.

You know how jarring it is to have a typical sequence of teens getting hunted down, losing friends to some crazed killers, fighting for their lives – and getting away? Not just getting away down the street before their car breaks down or something – I mean legit getting away; it went from “let’s get out of here,” to ‘One Week Later.’ That’s something that I’ve almost never seen, and it’s so damn jarring.

I do think it leads to one of the strongest portions of the film, though, when the survivors are trying to get back into the normal vibe of things after the deaths of their friends. It’s a quick sequence, but it’s a nice look at what might happen after such a tragedy. Not many slashers deal with the aftereffects, and I dug that.

Problematically, I didn’t care for anything else about the final twenty minutes. I hated so much about the ending that, thinking about it, I don’t think I can name a single thing I liked, which is pretty impressive. Some of the few decent characters were either killed or mentally incapacitated, and things just end in such a disengaging way. It was just pathetic.

Some of the performances were decent. Heidi Kristoffer was probably the strongest, Emily Grace had some solid scenes (though her character became rather unbearable the longer she lasted, and her last scene was quite awful), and Noah Fleiss could be amusing. Adam Scarimbolo made an okay lead, but I didn’t care much for his character, and playing his father was Greg Travis, who was a bit over-the-top (my favorite scene is when he urinates on his son, because that’s what fathers do, I guess). Worst of all was Mel Gorham – I get it, she was probably aiming to play her character to a goofy, over-emotional level, but I couldn’t stand her for a single second.

There’s a bunch of stuff in the film that just didn’t feel as though it really had a place, such as a couple of characters who rape and sexually assult women under a hypnotherapist’s care, and really a lot of the beginning segments, before the characters reach the abandoned town. Many things near the end were inadvisable too, and as I said, I don’t think any of it was great, and some of the plot choices they made just felt off.

Certainly Mother’s Day Massacre (which, FYI, has nothing to do with Mother’s Day, and aside from the finale, has little to do with mothers either) is unique, and there are a few amusing sequences, but I’ve seen it twice now, and as I said, it feels more a mess than anything else.

4.5/10