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Bloody Mama<\/strong> (1970)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 American International\/Action-Drama\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 90 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (bloody violence, nudity, sexual content, rape, language, drug use)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Roger Corman\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Robert Thom\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Don Randi\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: John A. Alonzo\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: March 24, 1970 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Shelley Winters, Pat Hingle, Don Stroud, Diane Varsi, Bruce Dern, Clint Kimbrough, Robert De Niro, Robert Walden, Alex Nicol, Pamela Dunlap, Michael Fox, Scatman Crothers, Stacy Harris, Lisa Jill, Steve Mitchell, Roy Idom.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $1.5M (US)<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Rating<\/strong>: ***\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \u00a0The Depression-era gangster film Bloody Mama<\/strong> is no lark. It\u2019s a dour affair that doesn\u2019t even try to turn Ma Barker and her sons into folk heroes like Arthur Penn did with Bonnie and Clyde three years prior. What\u2019s heroic about rape, incest, sadism and cold-blooded murder? Nothing, that\u2019s what. Director Roger Corman (The St. Valentine\u2019s Day Massacre) takes a completely serious approach to this crime drama chronicling the violent career of the Barker Gang. The result is a compelling, sometimes unsettling film that broke several taboos when it came out in 1970, a mere three years after the abolition of the outdated Production Code.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \u00a0Two-time Oscar winner Shelley Winters (The Diary of Anne Frank, A Patch of Blue) stars as Kate \u201cMa\u201d Barker, a deranged woman who led her four equally disturbed sons on a violent, multistate crime spree in the early 30s. An opening scene shows young Kate being raped by her father while her two brothers held her down. She grew up to be living proof of what Nietzsche said about that which does not kill us. In adulthood, she\u2019s the loving mother (a little too loving if you know I mean) of four who genuinely believes her boys can do no wrong. Oh, but they can and they have! They\u2019re bad boys, VERY bad boys. The oldest Herman (Stroud, Angel Unchained) is psychotic. Lloyd (De Niro, Taxi Driver) is a junkie. Fred (Walden, Lou Grant) is a gay masochist. Arthur (Kimbrough, Night Call Nurses) is the quiet, pragmatic one. All of them are depraved whack jobs. And you thought your family was f***ed up?<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \u00a0The Barkers are later joined by mentally unstable gunman Kevin (Dern, Coming Home) and prostitute Mona (Varsi, Compulsion). Herman is infatuated with the latter while the former is Fred\u2019s lover. That doesn\u2019t stop Ma from inviting him to share her bed. Trouble has a way of following the family wherever they go. At one point, they take a young woman hostage after Lloyd rapes her while stoned out of his mind. Not wanting to leave behind a living witness, Ma drowns her in the bathtub. Later on, they kidnap a prominent businessman (Hingle, Sudden Impact) and hold him for ransom. This is when the balance of power starts to change within the family unit.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \u00a0Bloody Mama<\/strong> is something of an anomaly for Corman, a change of pace if you will. It\u2019s not one of his usual no-budget quickies made to cash in on whatever genre happens to be trendy at the moment. He has serious aspirations with this one. He condemns rather than condones the criminal lifestyle. Ma and the gang aren\u2019t in it for kicks and giggles. It\u2019s a matter of Ma wanting her piece of the pie. She longs for the freedom that comes with being rich. She feels she deserves it and will stop at nothing to get it. If that means stealing and killing, then so be it. So what we\u2019re looking at then is a searing indictment of the American Dream and how it only applies to the haves while the have-nots continually get passed over.\u00a0 I never knew Corman had a serious side.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \u00a0Winters delivers a wonderfully unhinged performance as Ma Barker, a woman who has a strong matriarchal grip on her grown sons, lovingly bathing them one minute and slapping them around the next. She shows the full depth of her demented devotion to her boys with a rendition of the WWI anthem \u201cI Didn\u2019t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier\u201d just after they rid themselves of Lloyd\u2019s rape victim. De Niro, in an early role, is eerily good as Lloyd, the son always trying to measure up to his brothers and always falling short. The drugs, which he hides in candy bar wrappers, make him unpredictable and therefore, dangerous. Stroud is positively scary as Herman, a violent psycho obsessed with looking into the eyes of potential victims to see if they\u2019re like his father\u2019s. Dern excels at playing unbalanced characters, just look at his filmography. He, of course, nails it here. Hingle, playing the most sympathetic character in the film, is terrific as the kidnap victim, a basically decent man who tries to connect with his captors.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \u00a0It looks like Corman had a budget to work with on Bloody Mama<\/strong>. It is very period authentic with the vintage cars, clothes and impoverished settings. The action scenes are well mounted. The finale, a hail of bullets situation replete with blood splatter and a freeze frame final shot, is awesome. The violence is both shocking and horrific with moments like Herman slowly choking a guy by stepping on his neck. This film wallows in misery and sadism, but there\u2019s a point to it. Although Bloody Mama <\/strong>is largely a fictional take on the Barker saga, it shows just how cruel and unheroic they really were. They did some reprehensible things like using a baby pig to lure an alligator to its death by machine gunfire. Cruelty to animals, that\u2019s an instant turn off for me.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \u00a0I can\u2019t say that I enjoyed Bloody Mama<\/strong>. It\u2019s often unpleasant in its centering on despicable, depraved characters without an ounce of decency. At the same time, it\u2019s a fascinating film. These are terrible people who do terrible things, but you can\u2019t look away no matter how hard you try. PLUS, it has a completely whacked-out Shelley Winters at the center. That alone makes it worth a watch.<\/p>\r\n Bloody Mama (1970)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 American International\/Action-Drama\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 90 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (bloody violence, nudity, sexual content, rape, language, drug use)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Roger Corman\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Robert Thom\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Don Randi\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: John A. Alonzo\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: March 24, 1970 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Shelley Winters, Pat Hingle, Don Stroud, Diane Varsi, Bruce Dern, Clint Kimbrough, Robert De Niro, Robert […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":997,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-adventure","category-b-movies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Bloody-Mama-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":999,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions\/999"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Bloody-Mama-POSTER.jpg?resize=620%2C969&ssl=1\")
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