☆☆½
There's something distinctly disturbing about Ma that goes beyond what's on screen. It's 2019 and we've got a youth-oriented horror film that suggest women over 40 all become shrill hags, dead-end waitresses or, worse, homicidal maniacs who never got past the worst moments of high school.
Ma offers up a dim view of humanity. It also manages to make an equally depressing (but possibly unintended) commentary on Hollywood's own attitude toward women of a certain age: Not one but two Oscar-winning supporting actresses, Octavia Spencer and Allison Janney, star in this blood-soaked horror film, and a third nominee, Juliette Lewis, is also one of the leads.
Spencer plays Sue Ann Ellington, a small-town veterinary assistant who has an unhealthy obsession with high-school kids, for whom she buys liquor before inviting them to her house to party it up. The kids don't ask questions or find it odd that a single woman wants them to get drunk in her basement. The movie slowly sets up the backstory for "Ma," and it's a credit to Spencer and Lewis, as well as the kids (particularly Diana Silvers from the infinitely superior Booksmart) that for a while they actually make it work.
The first hour builds interest, but Ma goes hopelessly off the rails in a ridiculously violent third act, when "Ma" starts to bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the "hagsploitation" flicks of the 1960s, in which aging, has-been actresses went crazy, because that's what audiences assumed happened to over-the-hill actresses. Have times changed so little?
Viewed June 11, 2019 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks
1955
Ma offers up a dim view of humanity. It also manages to make an equally depressing (but possibly unintended) commentary on Hollywood's own attitude toward women of a certain age: Not one but two Oscar-winning supporting actresses, Octavia Spencer and Allison Janney, star in this blood-soaked horror film, and a third nominee, Juliette Lewis, is also one of the leads.
Spencer plays Sue Ann Ellington, a small-town veterinary assistant who has an unhealthy obsession with high-school kids, for whom she buys liquor before inviting them to her house to party it up. The kids don't ask questions or find it odd that a single woman wants them to get drunk in her basement. The movie slowly sets up the backstory for "Ma," and it's a credit to Spencer and Lewis, as well as the kids (particularly Diana Silvers from the infinitely superior Booksmart) that for a while they actually make it work.
The first hour builds interest, but Ma goes hopelessly off the rails in a ridiculously violent third act, when "Ma" starts to bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the "hagsploitation" flicks of the 1960s, in which aging, has-been actresses went crazy, because that's what audiences assumed happened to over-the-hill actresses. Have times changed so little?
Viewed June 11, 2019 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks
1955
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