Saturday, May 7, 2011

Bloody Mama (1970)

4 / 5 Apr '10
Tagline: Say it with bullets!
Directed by: Roger Corman
Written by: Don Peters, Robert Thom
Actors include: Shelley Winters, Pat Hingle, Robert De Niro
Genre: Drama, Crime, Action, Exploitation
Length: 90 minutes
Banned: Nope




Review:
Pretty enjoyably sleazy exploitation take on the whole Ma Baker and her good 'ole boys thing...only it's pretty inaccurate. I don't know much about the real story of the Bakers so the inconsistencies don't bother me in the slightest. Shelley Winters is very amusing as Ma Baker, the ringleader of evil doings and crime. She raises her boys to be very bad with warped ideas on what is good and bad and all of the rest but she's big on family and so are her boys. Hilariously Robert De Niro plays one of her sons, the heroin addicted paint sniffin' Baby Ruth chompin' boy and he's great...I just didn't expect to see him in a film like this. They rob banks as a family, kill people and more warped situations they get themselves into the meaner and more selfish Ma proves to be. It's actually very shocking and it goes a lot further than I would have expected. Heck the opening sequence is Ma as a young girl being raped by her Father (offscreen) but still...that's quite disturbing. This sort of follows from their needing to escape their home and leaving Pa Baker behind to the demise of the family. Very action packed and full of thrills and surprises, a lot more depraved than I was expecting but very fun in a way too. Corman does it again and it seems with each picture he pushes the envelope a bit further, I wonder what happened after this 'un?

Availability:  On DVD as part of the Roger Corman Collection

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