MA: Throws A Trashy Party

Horror movies are full of terrifying creatures, but none are quite like Octavia Spencer‘s Ma. A middle-aged black woman who’s first seen walking a three-legged dog, she seems as benign as they come, but the joke between the audience and the film is that we know she’s evil incarnate. Everyone signed up for a horror film, and the only thing creeping around our teens for slaughter is this alarmingly helpful woman.

The Oscar winner is stepping into a well-worn kind of schlock, one where a b-movie premise is given some fancy duds and legit actors. I mean, we’ve already had Isabelle Huppert deliciously camping it up in Greta this year, and Ma gives Spencer the chance to do the same. She’s basically playing an adolescent in a woman’s body, emotionally stunted enough to want to party with teens but able to buy the liquor herself. These are obviously untenable relationships, and it doesn’t take long for the hilariously creepy other shoe to drop.

My bar for this sort of movie is pretty low. I just want it to keep moving, give me some ridiculous lines to quote, and dear god make the ending big and loud. Ma checks all those boxes, and if it isn’t exactly a shining example example of the sub-genre, it is a hell of a lot of fun in the moment.

Blumhouse Orders The Champagne

Setting out to make classy schlock is one thing, but getting all the pieces in place is a tall task. If anyone can do it in today’s market, though, it’s the production company Blumhouse, who’s figured out the formula for mildly interesting genre fare that consistently turns a profit. It’s a bastion of respectability for people looking to slum it, which makes the presence of Spencer and director Tate Taylor seem almost normal. If the duo who partied through the 2012 Oscar season with The Help were going to make a horror film, it makes sense that they’d end up at Blumhouse, who plugs the duos’ skills into their machine with alarming ease.

Taylor is known mostly as a workmanlike director, presenting films in exactly the ways you’d expect. I’d push against that reputation, though, as his James Brown biopic Get on Up had a c*ckeyed, riotously funny edit (it certainly wasn’t constructed as a traditional biopic), and Ma has more than the minimum 15 pieces of flair. It plays with depth of frame to make connections between parents and children, pushes in disturbingly close on character’s faces, and still remembers to take time out for Spencer to yell at unruly animals (her character is a vet tech).

Flourishes were the least important thing Taylor brings to the project, though, as he picked up a cavalcade of actors who invite the audience to relish in the skeezy material. There’s Spencer, who chews every bit of scenery while still keeping her character’s motivation somewhat at the fore (the role was initially written as a white woman but Taylor immediately thought of his old friend). Then there’s the small, pop-up characters filled by actors who never would’ve signed on without a respectable name at the helm. Allison Janney is a perfect example of this as the frustrated vet employing Spencer, appearing for twenty seconds at a time to spit off droll lines like “put down the phone and shave that dog.” Did this role need her? No. Is it absolutely delightful to have a comedy master deliver these asides? Hell yes.

The rest of the cast is your usual Blumhouse types: cheap young adults plucked from television doldrums wandering stupidly into danger and looking pretty doing it. Some are better than others (Diana Silvers holds her own as the main kid while McKaley Miller makes for a surprisingly likable loudmouth). They all hit that strange balance of being endearing enough to care about but annoying enough to kinda deserve death, which is really key to making the nastiness of their descent into Ma’s clutches fun.

Violent Delights

As I’ve already alluded to, this movie is dumb as a rock, with characters taking unnecessary risks, coincidences overflowing, and themes that are half baked at best. It’s impossible to miss such massive faults, but there’s certain genre standards that mostly make up for this, even if they creep into the narrative in uneven ways.

The boogeymen of horror (Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger) all rely on a certain amount of idiocy. Their victims run straight into them because they’re less character than metaphor, usually representing some petrifying eventuality we all must face. Resistance is futile, and these films waste little time explaining this construct.

A metaphorical character isn’t something you expect from star-driven horror, though. Spencer’s only going to do one of these (right?), so her character has to be more grounded in reality. Ma pays lip service to this idea, giving her a spliced in backstory that somewhat explains her craziness. The misstep is that this subplot is far too serious to consider, bringing down the otherwise jaunty fun and making the violence far too personal. None of these characters should feel like actual people because it’s horrifying to kill actual people. It’s much more comfortable to kill a metaphor, and just in time, Ma gets that lesson.

Its bombastic ending is so on the nose that it literally labels each character as an archetype, removing any of the queasy specificity it had flirted with. That allows the characters to do grisly, squeal-inducing things to each other, and it allows for an absolutely ridiculous turn to go off without a hitch. This movie is far from the real world; It’s Ma’s world, and the retribution she stands for cannot be avoided.

Conclusion: Ma

With abundant humor and a gruesome ending, Ma is a knowingly silly horror film that allows Spencer to revel in the grime. You’ll be right there with her, goaded along by the film’s zippy plot and horror film cliches. No one’s trying to reinvent the wheel here, but Taylor has smoothed out the road enough that you won’t be bothered by the bumps along the way.

What did you think of Ma? Did you find the mix of humor and horror effective? Let us know in the comments!

Ma was released in theaters in the US and UK on May 31, 2019. For all international release dates, see here.