Mama

Previews can be damn dirty liars in some cases. Mama is certainly one of them. The previews make it look like one of those good old-fashioned horror movies that rely on genuine scares as opposed to loud noises and bloody deaths to get the point across. And considering Guillermo del Toro's name was all over any advertisement associated with the movie, I was extra excited. That anticipation was shot directly to hell, as Mama unfortunately fails to provide scares and just comes off across as silly and unintentionally hillarious way too often.

Mama stars Jessica Chastain (The Help, Zero Dark Thirty) as Annabel, a punk rock musician whose boyfriend has now brought in his brother's children after years of them being missing. There's only one little problem; the children have been raised by an overprotective monster named Mama, who has sucked every ounce of human out of the girls, reducing them to monsters who growl, crawl, and eat bugs like fritos. Once Annabel begins to become closer to the children, Mama isn't having it, and you won't like Mama when she's angry.

Mama does have some redeeming features. Jessica Chastain is easily the best part of this movie. She's sympathetic and humorous as the lead getting screwed over by her boyfriend's overprotective tendencies of the girls. Her reactions alone to the girls' tendencies to well, act like animals...are easily the best parts of the movie. And I would say that despite most of it failing to provide thrills (which I will explain more in the next paragraph), there are some good scares in this movie and none of which have any gore in them. Which is always pretty impressive.

Now for the less solid parts of Mama, and I felt there were a few which stopped the movie from being stellar. My biggest issue with Mama lies in the plot and the writing. I felt like the story ran out of gas rather quickly. The central idea of a paranormal entity following around two girls like a paranoid, homicidal mother, feels like a 30 min episode of Twilight Zone/Tales from the Crypt. There's not enough material or places to go with the story, so turning it into a 90 minute movie feels like stretching a piece of gum to a different planet. There's too many scenes of the girls crawling around, playing with someone that isn't there, or looking over at someone just to give a quick look, that after a while it just becomes tiresome, and rather funny. There's only so many times you can watch two 9 year old children running around like dogs before it just feels like...well, children running around like dogs. And it doesn't help that the ending seems to take a turn for the worse. Things could have ended in a rather creepy way, making the audience feel that despite its' flaws, that this twisted horror fairy tale ended on the right note. But like it's antagonist, the movie just takes a jump off the cliff and never comes back.

2/4