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Scream Bloody Murder
Are you my mother?
1973
Review: October 22, 2007
Director: Marc B. Ray
Starring: Fred Holbert, Leigh Mitchell, Robert Knox
Ubetcha.
THE SETUP:
Someone’s still working through his Oedipus complex, to put it mildly.
DISCUSSION:
Freud theorized that all boys, when very young, fall in love with their mother and consider their father the enemy. The way they end up handling this conflict and resigning themselves to the situation will have a huge impact on the kind of person they turn out to be. This is the famous Oedipus complex, and, as demonstrated by Scream Bloody Murder, some people negotiate this developmental dilemma better than others.
We open in a field. Young Matthew [maybe 8 years old?] is sitting around as his father does something or other with a parked tractor. Matthew wanders over the tractor, sits at the controls, takes one last appraising glance at his pop, then runs him over, leaving him a mangled corpse. Matt is now on a runaway tractor, and goes a little while before jumping off, his hand somehow falling under the tread and getting crushed to a bloody pulp. It’s a little unrealistic that his hand would somehow fall like this, but I think it is, to continue in the Freudian vein, to demonstrate that in killing his own father, Matthew also inflicts a phallic injury upon himself. This is why, like it or not, it’s usually advisable to leave one’s father alive. The rest of this film will serve as a case study.
So Matthew goes off to some juvenile home and his outfitted with a prosthetic hook for a hand. He’s about to be let out and reads a letter from his mom about how he’s going to just love Mr. Parsons, his new stepdaddy. “Mr. Parsons!” Matthew sneers in disgust.
Well, maybe Mom just didn’t write down the date when her son, who has spent the bulk of his life in an institution, would be returning home at last, because she’s away. Not only is she away, she’s marrying Mr. Parsons! Right at that VERY moment. It’s amazing how life works out sometimes! So the newlyweds return home, ready to consummate their union, when they find mom’s mentally-disturbed son on the porch, ready to stay and acting all hateful toward the new dad. Talk about a cock block!
SPOILERS > > > Let’s turn our attention to Mr. Parsons. He is a blond slab of mellow California virility, with a huge mustache, low voice, and preference for denim. He is the kind of guy who holds his wife and says “I’m here now, baby,” and casually refers to Matthew as “boy.” He looks like one of those guys from a Camel cigarettes ad from the 70s, and as such, his looks and personality, as presented, were giving me a BONER. Oh, and did I mention, by the way, that his first name is MACK? Yup. I was looking forward to a nice long movie featuring Mack’s gravelly masculine essence, but sadly, despite his attempts to befriend Matthew, he gets thanked with multiple axe wounds to the upper torso.
Matt then goes to find his mama, informing her that he killed the mean man for her and now they can be together for ever and ever and ever, and learns to his surprise that she isn’t too thrilled about this. Matt gets a little excited in his frustration, and dashes mom’s head on a rock. Now what’s left to live for?
So he takes to the road, and is soon offered a ride by Brenda and Lex, who just got married—eloped, actually—and are more than happy to have Matt join them. What is with this Matthew kid? He sure as the ability to sniff out the newly-married! So Brenda and Lex, who are one having fun driving in the glow of love, yet somehow want a mentally-damaged amputee to join them on their honeymoon, see the most delightful creek and decide that they simply must bask in its cooling waters. They exhort Matthew to join them, but he starts having visions of them as his mother and Mack, and he starts throwing rocks at the guy! This, I thought, was kind of funny. Then he charges out there and bludgeons the guy to death, turning to the woman, calling her mama, and saying that now they can at last be together. When she doesn’t respond as hoped, she ends up like his real mother.
So Matt—whose hair turned from blond to brunette upon return from the mental hospital—runs out into the desert, where he hears voices and we hear the kind of bouncy, reassuring music I associate with something like The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. He then comes upon a red-headed woman painting a picture on the front porch of her low-income housing. She is the kind of $20 whore with a heart of gold who takes kindly to obviously mentally damaged individuals with mother complexes. I'm not just being mean, she really only charges $20. He asks if he can be her friend, but has to wait as a sailor comes by to commission her services. Matt kills the sailor on a bridge after he leaves. He and Vera continue to hang out, with Matt asking if he can call her Daisy, which she agrees to. Now let this blow your mind [or not]: Vera is played by the same woman who played Matt’s MOTHER! This is what sociobiologists today are referring to when they say “freaky-deaky.”
So Matt stops by an elderly couple’s grand manse and bludgeons them to death, saying “Sorry, I need the house.” It’s SO like Native Americans apologizing to the Buffalo or whatever. He then takes Vera there, saying they can live together, and when she says she likes her little trailer-trash accommodations, he ties her up and keeps her captive!
Matt goes on a mugging spree to get money to buy Vera the finer things, hoping she’ll start to like it there. She doesn’t. I’m afraid that this is where the movie took a turn for the tedious, as I just don’t really want to watch captive woman drama, and it’s the same tedious try to escape / he catches her and gets violent / try to escape… kind of deal.
Eventually Vera starts coming on to Matt as a way to unsettle him, which works, and you start to think that she’s going to outsmart him and escape. She finally attacks and makes it to the door but we find out, rather late in the game, that Matt is apparently capable of teleportation, as he is inexplicably outside the door and slashes her. Vera dies. That was a surprise!
Then Matt really starts to be haunted by visions of this nasty mother figure calling out to him. She’s coming down the stairs, she’s in the car, she has more locations than Chase ATMs. Finally Matt makes it to a church, where after some writhing and moaning and haunting he slashes his own stomach and dies. The boring end.
The main thing this movie puts me in mind of is WHY the standard structure of the woman who fights back and finally defeats her assailant is in place: it gives the audience a person to identify with and root for. And it gives you some interest in watching to find out how she does it. I don’t want to see some dude be destroyed by his own conscience. It just doesn’t have the same interest, because there’s no one to identify with. It leaves you, the viewer, out. And that’s what happens here.
< < < SPOILERS END
Other than that, well, still not that great, The first 45 minutes have some amusement with the deranged Matt doing his deranged thing, and everyone loves murderous, ungrateful children, but once we get into the second part the fun fades away and it gets distinctly unpleasant, then ends on a poor note. Yeah, whatever, another useless move up the old optic nerve.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
If you’re trapped in a basement with a bunch of budget DVDs and this is one of them.
