Universal Pictures
I can’t smoke pot anymore because my kids will get taken away to be raised by a malevolent spirit. So I do it at the movies. This week: Mama, a horror movie produced by Guillermo Del Toro that completely freaked me out.
There are two ways watching a horror movie can go if you’re high. The good way is when you’re blissed out through the whole thing and laughing and ridiculous and you can just sort of ride along with the vibe of the thing, no matter what gross stuff is happening. And then there’s the bad way. The way where you start to get really invested in the characters and what’s happening and you start freaking the hell out in a dark theater. That’s what Mama did to me and I didn’t like it at all.
Here’s the basic story. Two little girls are orphaned and left in a cabin in the woods, where they’re raised by a creepy-ass creature that they call Mama. Five years later, a search party finds them and brings them home to their uncle and his girlfriend. Unfortunately, they’re not alone – Mama has followed them back, and she’s pissed as hell.
The awesome and horrible thing about this movie is that there’s not any real “fake scares” where it’s just a cat or the wind blowing a door or something. If there’s a scary noise, it’s Mama. If there’s something you barely see out of the corner of your eye, it’s Mama. But the awesome thing is that even if there wasn’t a scary-ass monster in this movie, it would still be scary because the two little girls are just messed up to all Hell.
I love stories about kids raised by wolves and stuff like that, so this was a good hook for me, and their bizarre adaptation to civilized life is something to see, especially the younger one, who never really knew anybody but Mama as a parent. The acting in this movie is all really good, which is saying a lot for a horror movie, and Jessica Chastain is super good – she doesn’t really want the responsibility of two kids all of a sudden, never mind a creepy ghost monster.
The only thing that really sucks about this movie is the ending, which kind of drags on and has a bunch of dumb CGI. Ending a horror movie is hard though, because either everybody dies or you kill the monster or make it go away and there’s not a lot of wiggle room in there. Mama tries something a little different but doesn’t really manage to pull it off so well.
It’s still worth seeing though. Really worth seeing. Go see it.
Disclaimer: I fixed all of the typos and grammar mistakes but left everything else in.