Mother is set in 'Rochester New York' & tells the twisted tale of the widowed Olivia Hendrix (Dianne Ladd, also co-producer) & her only son Tommy (Morgan Weisser), together they run a card shop called 'From the Heart'. From initial appearances they seem like any other mother & son but in fact Olivia is extremely possessive & wants to control Tommy's life. Recently Tommy has been suffering from headaches & has been visiting Dr. Sid Baden (Steven Anderson) where he has met Audrey (Ele Keats) the pretty receptionist who has recently lost her father. Tommy sends her a nice card & their relationship begins to blossom. Tommy & Audrey decide to go out together but Olivia finds out & is very unhappy & jealous, she tries to warn Audrey off her son with little success. After various rows & confrontations things take a dark turn, Olivia fakes a suicide attempt, their 60 plus year old weird shop assistant Natalie Jay (Olympia Dukakis) tries to seduce & have sex with Tommy (!) & as Olivia becomes more & more desperate to keep Tommy at home she resorts to murder...
Directed Frank LaLoggia I found little to enjoy in Mother. The script by Michael Angelella is slow & never really gripped me. It takes itself far too seriously & the plot is a mess. It's touched upon that Natalie has cancer, why? Nothing ever becomes of it unless you count her ridiculous motives for some totally unbelievable narrative. What about the silly sub-plot about Tommy's father still being alive? Again nothing is really done with it other than to pad out time until the final twist ending which is just silly & doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you think about it. If Olivia had two children with this guy where did he think the second child went exactly? Did he think it vanished into thin air? There are some entertaining scenes here, purely for laughs of course, the dinner table conversation, the bit when Natalie tries to seduce Tommy & that ending. Mother has a certain perversity about it & could have been a good horror but instead treads the well worn path of the melodrama concentrating on character's rather than action.
Director LaLoggia keeps Mother strictly in the land of bland made-for-TV films that have no personality or style. It's competent but nothing else. Forget about any blood or gore, this is as dry as they come, an off screen murder by axe, an electrocution & that's about it except for a few splashes of blood at the end.
Technically Mother was never going to be astounding on it's TV film budget, it's as well made as you would expect or hope. I personally found the acting pretty bad, but hey that's just my opinion.
Mother is a totally forgettable TV film that fails to inspire anything much other than boredom & negative feeling. Give this one a miss as there are far better films out there although I have seen worse.
Directed Frank LaLoggia I found little to enjoy in Mother. The script by Michael Angelella is slow & never really gripped me. It takes itself far too seriously & the plot is a mess. It's touched upon that Natalie has cancer, why? Nothing ever becomes of it unless you count her ridiculous motives for some totally unbelievable narrative. What about the silly sub-plot about Tommy's father still being alive? Again nothing is really done with it other than to pad out time until the final twist ending which is just silly & doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you think about it. If Olivia had two children with this guy where did he think the second child went exactly? Did he think it vanished into thin air? There are some entertaining scenes here, purely for laughs of course, the dinner table conversation, the bit when Natalie tries to seduce Tommy & that ending. Mother has a certain perversity about it & could have been a good horror but instead treads the well worn path of the melodrama concentrating on character's rather than action.
Director LaLoggia keeps Mother strictly in the land of bland made-for-TV films that have no personality or style. It's competent but nothing else. Forget about any blood or gore, this is as dry as they come, an off screen murder by axe, an electrocution & that's about it except for a few splashes of blood at the end.
Technically Mother was never going to be astounding on it's TV film budget, it's as well made as you would expect or hope. I personally found the acting pretty bad, but hey that's just my opinion.
Mother is a totally forgettable TV film that fails to inspire anything much other than boredom & negative feeling. Give this one a miss as there are far better films out there although I have seen worse.