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MOM

WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOUR MOM TURNED INTO A WEREWOLF?



★★★★☆ (Worth the Watch)

Director: Patrick Rand

1991



Mom is so damn charming, I can’t help but recommend it as a perfect gateway film for those who want to dip their toes in campy vintage horror. This story about a sweet old lady baking Christmas cookies and nagging her son about marriage before she's turned into a blood-thirsty werewolf has enough mild frights, cheesy moments, and heart to make it worthwhile. It completely caught me off guard during an afternoon of bad movie-watching, and it received rave reviews during my annual Christmas horror party.


In the middle of the night, a man abandons his adult daughter with nothing but a suitcase and smokes. The father drives off, not seeming to care that the only person around is a large stranger (Nestor) who wears sunglasses at night and gives off the vibes of a murderer/trafficker. The young lady tries to make small talk and seems very nice, so we feel horrible when Nestor drags her off into the desert and rips her to shreds. Cue the delightful tune “Joy to the World”…


This is when we change tone completely and drop in on Emily’s house, all decorated for Christmas. Mom is a master lesson in setting up our sympathies with an underhanded pitch, before the title credits have even ended. As the titular character bastes a turkey and waits alone at home for a visit from her reporter son Clay, we figure out that both her grown children have essentially abandoned her. The gift from her absentee daughter is a pair of slippers, and Emily places them in a drawer with all the other identical slippers she’s gotten over the years. Obviously lonely, the old woman dresses her dog up in a matching red sweater, and is patient when her son and his girlfriend finally show up and hurry the festivities along. Right off the bat, we adore her and really, really despise her kids. Unfortunately for us, one of these spawns (Clay) is the actual protagonist.


Because there’s no one keeping an eye on the elderly lady, she’s ripe for the picking. In the first scene with Mom, we see a sign in her window that says, “Room for Let” and that takes us to Nestor showing up at her door. While most of us know to put a stranger through a vetting process, this fragile woman is so eager for company that after exchanging three sentences with the guy on her doorstep, she says, “Welcome home!” Perhaps Mom is a thinly veiled treatise on how vulnerable our senior population is.



“Ma’am, I need your social security number for a survey.”




You can guess where this is going. Nestor nibbles on Emily, an act that not only gets rid of her arthritis, but also gives her a ravenous need for human flesh. It takes a shop keeper calling Clay to let him know something might be wrong with his mother for the young man to drive to Emily’s and meet Nestor, who seems to have a strange hold on her. Our hero finally takes an interest in the woman who birthed him when she turns into a beast, but by then it’s too late. At this point, Nestor has become her caretaker, feeding her and leading her to prey, though Emily is such a sweetheart she likes to give homeless people a last meal before eating them. When Nestor is suddenly out of the picture, Clay is left with a conundrum: Feed his mother flesh or let her starve to death. He also has to figure out how to keep reporting on the serial murders in the area without exposing her as the perpetrator. As he struggles to balance his new life—risking the one he has with his pregnant girlfriend—you’ll put yourself in his difficult position.


Mom has a good script, decent performances, and a wonderful character in Emily (played by the always adventurous Jeanne Bates), so for the life of me, I don’t understand why this film doesn’t get more attention or have a Wikipedia page*. There’s a delicate balance of scares and humorous bits and sad moments in Mom, but there’s also a lesson to all those adult kids out there who ignore their kindly, geriatric parents: Call your mother.



*As of the posting of this article.






GENRES: Funny, Monster/Creature


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