By the of the 1980s, everyone who was anyone on the cult cinema scene would know the name Troma Entertainment, the brainchild of Lloyd Kaufmann, and the name would carry certain assumptions. Mother’s Day, released in 1980 when Troma was just one of (too)many upstart companies looking to get in on the exploitation cinema boon, to test the intersection of cinematic dissent and commercial success, both fulfills and disfigures those expectations. Expecting a broad, try-hard, somewhat over-baked work that announces itself repeatedly as a travesty of serious cinema, director Charles Kaufmann (Lloyd’s brother) and co-writer Warren Leight instead offer a cruel, tetchy, unsettling crypto-slasher that manages to probe quite viciously into various currents of its time-period’s psyche while technically retaining the surface texture of a silly comedy.

Mother’s Day wastes no time confusing us, trading one set of cultural signifiers for another within minutes. It opens on alien scene that eventually clarifies as refuse from an alien past that is still with us: Ernie’s Growth Opportunity, a frisky, cutting parody of a distinctly ‘70s brand of New Age individualism, a pitilessly brutal take-down of the degradation of collective resistance into individualized forms of personal “integration”. “Don’t stop to think what you feel, cause then you won’t know it,” the resident Ernie tells us, before he invites us to perform a mind-meld with each other called a hug.

One of the attendees is Beatrice Pons (billed as Rose Ross), an elderly, deeply enthusiastic woman who offers to drive two deeply twitchy, insinuating hippie types home after their capacity for collective resistance has been wrung out to dry. Kaufmann ratchets up the instability, offering two nerve bundles who seem to tangle the cinema itself. But the real culprits arrive more unceremoniously in Mother’s Day: Ike (credited as Holden McQuire, but actually Frederick Coffin) and Addley (credited as Billy Ray McQuade, but actually Michael McCleery) emerge like wildfire and decapitate one of the hippies and then proceed to abuse and rape the other, all while Pons looks on in amusement and something resembling pride. These two killers are her children, they all love each other, and unlike us suburban or urban types, they are positively dying to kill to show their love for one another. Yes, the name of the game for the evening will be that other ‘70s breed of horror, the flip side of the introduction. Rather than the over-lit atriums and strip malls of suburban America, we get the country-fried cruelty that so famously contoured the decade’s fear of that increasingly marginal space something called “civilization” was supposedly exhausting.

In a broader sense, Mother’s Day technically dresses like a slasher, not so much copying the rhythms of the nascent genre as squinting its eyes to slantwise visualize the sub-genre that was about to come. The first noticeable difference: good characters. After the shock double-intro kill (soon to be a stable of Friday the 13^th’s everywhere), we get three surprisingly lived-in scenes of, in order, Trina (Tiana Pierce), a Los Angeles hanger-on, Abbey (Nancy Hendrickson), who lives in Chicago and is a perpetual victim of her omnipresent but unseen mother, and New Yorker Jackie (Deborah Luce),  defined by another of her clearly awful boyfriends who say things like “you held out longer than most broads”). Each sequence hinges on a stereotype, but the three moments actually sketch a friendship that will emerge as surprisingly textured before long, each woman evidencing their own unique and fluctuating form of dignity, competence, concern, anxiety, and intimidation. In the context of a B film, schizophrenic characters tend to read like inadequate screenwriting, but, it also signals a surfeit of natural honesty, likely the product of a lazy scriptwriter providing breathing-room for his actresses to simply feel out their characters unadorned.It is the natural complement to the low-budget film’s perennial ability to visualize the reality around it with documentary verisimilitude simply because it has no money to do otherwise.

Just what perspective we are meant to have about Mother’s Day, precisely, is a lingering question. Several of the early “jump scares” actually depict one or two of the girls sticking their hands out to terrify the other, or Jackie with a false knife in her back, and this after they dress in crude paper bags to frighten Jackie in a store, a runner that nicely suggests how friendly the three still remain, or how capable of pretending to be ones, in spite of it never being explicitly commented on. The fake-out kill is a slasher staple, but Mother’s Day turns it into a film-length runner. One apparent stalking-POV turns out to be depicting a body being carried to safety, before a reverse trek of the same body becomes a ritual of friendship through vengeance. When one girl is in peril, an out-of-focus shot of a body slowly behind another woman suggests a poised killer, but the materialized hands around her chest instead convey tenderness and compassion. Later, when we see a hand sticking out of a dresser, it’s a call for help, and this still after another girl’s hands have been mangled, not by one of the villains but by the difficulties of an escape attempt. The bloodiest moment of the film comes from a successful escape attempt, not the actual killers. And, after so much foreboding, the actual moment when the real killers attack the three girls comes out of nowhere and with no forewarning at all.

I’m not sure if this is supposed to intimate anything beyond an impudent young company’s irrepressible desire (and somewhat less irrepressible ability) to play around, but it’s certainly spirited viewing. Kaufman infuses his film with a surprising depth of menace and more than a few pungent visual rhymes. For instance, a self-obsessed college guy running with his ass out, would-be assailant turned into a victim of their collective cunning, to an unrepentantly disturbing rape scene which the family who treat sexual assault as an elaborate family theater game and sporting contest between the boys. Or a genuinely heartwarming photo montage of friendship past that rhymes with a brutal assault depicted and disfigured in a cinematic gestalt of photographs.

The intersection of the domestic and the theatrical that unites these visual pairs remain closet fixations of the film, especially its killer parody of a domestic abode, clumsily ravaged with consumer debris in a way that suggests both authentic human clutter and filmmaker’s intentionality. Littered with GI Joe figurines and infested with Trix Cereal, the house becomes a labyrinth of American detritus, the very things that were supposed to signal the comforts of modern homogeneity and suburbia that the country others of the film are typically supposed to refuse. The walls are scratched by the sounds of television static, that perennial American bedtime story, slithering around the background. Although the sonic rays of American togetherness will become a weapon of bitter revenge before film’s end, the film’s mischievous democratic urge can’t but suggest that this family is “just like us.”

In this sense, Mother’s Day’s comedy has a triple-target, tackling both the “redneck horror” subgenre, the domestic suburbia positioned as the country’s other, and the horror cinema and scholarship of its era that was ready-made to psychologize fear, especially in a Freudian lens.  These two killer boys love their mother just as much as Anthony Perkins did, but the film doesn’t posit this as a Freudian flaw of underdeveloped masculinity so much as a simple conundrum of family life, of living too closely with the band of misfits you happen to be born into. But it remains difficult to parse, I suspect because it isn’t particularly interested in being dissected. When some of the characters mount a hasty escape from the clutches of this perverse parody of family life and of the psychoanalytic film babble that framed many of those films (that undergird the likes Psycho, later referenced in a quick shot of a taxidermied owl), the mother hardly cares, instead terrified of her wandering, animalistic sister, never mentioned before and who we never truly meet. What goal does this serve, other than because the filmmakers wanted a feral woman lurking about?

Mother’s Day, then, doesn’t really amount to much in the end, but it’s still a fairly vigorous, appealingly disorganized, case of mostly going nowhere, and it isn’t incapable of a pang of sadness when it wants. When the surviving characters run away from the villains’ house, they eventually make a perilous return trip back through the few hundred yards of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, now carrying a heavy object of deep, tragic meaning to them, a totem to shared friendship. It’s not an especially deep movie, but in the context for this film, the scene feels as momentous and epochal as Werner Herzog dragging a steamship over a mountain in Fitzcarraldo. I’m lying to you, but less than you’re probably expecting.  

Score: 7/10