Fanboy Flick Pick: Mama Is All Crazy Now

If you’ve seen the short film that ultimately grew to become Mama, you have a good idea of what to expect. Stretched out to an hour and a half, that tone sustains. Make no mistake, on the primal level that it needs to, Mama works one hundred per cent; I can’t recall being this scared in a movie since the heyday of J-horror. That there are plot points to argue with afterward is secondary – you can’t fake fear, and Mama brings it. So yes, Guillermo del Toro still knows what he’s doing as “presenter,” whatever that means (compare him to, say, Wes Craven, who will “present” anything – like Dracula 2000 – that helps to fund his next project).

The best horror always takes real-life fears and gives them a spin, and here we are dealing with several. The first, and silliest, ties in to our financial crisis: as we hear in radio broadcasts that the stock market has taken yet another colossal dump, Wall Street player Jeffrey (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) shoots and kills his wife, then drives his two young daughters out into the wilderness, where he crashes the car due to his preoccupation with yelling at them. Finding an isolated, uh, cabin in the woods, (cue program #WhateverTheFuck, Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford), he plans to shoot his daughters and then himself, but before he can execute part one, his neck gets snapped. Spoiler complainers, let’s get serious: you really thought the mainstream movie was going to allow kindergarteners to get knocked off? Don’t be silly. This is actually quite the metaphorical fairy-tale set-up, not unlike Snow White and the huntsman, but completely unlike the god-awful movie that was actually called Snow White and the Huntsman.

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