Mother's Day

Seemingly following in the genre footsteps of Bette Davis and Shelley Winters, onetime ingenue Rebecca De Mornay is a midlife monster-villain here, playing the mother/ringleader of a homicidal family of robbers. A home-schooling, fiercely disciplinarian type, Mrs. Koffin appears on the scene—on a dark and stormy night, no less—after her savage adult sons violently bungle an Omaha bank raid and flee to the formerly deserted family home, which was just bought by an upscale realtor couple in a foreclosure deal. With the new owners and their house-party guests taken hostage, mother Koffin presides over psychological manipulation, moralistic judgments, and mutilation-punishment, unmasking the captives' own hidden disloyalties and greed during the process of arranging a getaway with the loot. This grim exercise in sadism is a supposed remake of the 1980s horror-cheapie "cult classic" (honk if you've heard of it) Mother's Day, but that doesn't redeem any of the degrading torture-porn elements, despite whatever humor is inherent in De Mornay's prim PTA wardrobe ensemble and tiger-mom attitude. Not recommended. (C. Cassady)