|
CORRIDOR
OF NOIR |
DARK
CORRIDORS
VOL. 2,
No. 24 |
Ron
Miller
presents
MOTHERS
FROM HELL!
Monstrously
Bad Moms from Movies & TV
|
These Moms
deserve flowers -- preferably on their gravesites!
By
RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
SURE,
I'LL ADMIT it's kind of mean-spirited to write about how bad
some Moms can be on Mother's Day, but the truth is Bad Moms have
been providing us with some deliciously wicked entertainment
for generations--and maybe it's time to pay them homage!
Let
the other guys write about Olivia DeHavilland in "To Each
His Own," Helen Hayes in "The Sin of Madelon Claudet"
or Barbara Stanwyck in "Stella Dallas." This is the
21st century and civilization is heading for the dumpster anyway,
so why waste more of your valuable time with boring tales of
mother love and sacrifice when it's obvious we're becoming a
society of sleazy day care centers and malicious nannies?
So,
if you're not allergic to a little tongue-in-cheekiness on my
part, come along and spend some time with with these Monster
Moms from the movies and TV:
1.
HELENA VESEY of "MOTHER LOVE" |
|
When
most of us think of Diana Rigg, it's probably as sexy Emma Peel
in TV's "The Avengers," the most unforgettable character
she probably ever played. But excuse me for scoffing if anyone
ever suggests that's the most interesting character she ever
played. Though I lusted for Rigg's Emma like most red-blooded
American boys of the 1960s, the Rigg character that haunts me
most is Helena Vesey, the smother-mother she played in "Mother
Love," a British TV drama that aired on PBS' "Mystery!"
in 1990. Helena was a tightly-wound homicidal mom who became
so possessive of her own adult son that she visited him in the
hospital when he was critically ill--and pulled out his life-support
tubes just because she found out he'd been visiting his father,
the ex-husband who dumped her for another woman. Rigg played
Helena as a sociopathic neurotic who's screwed-down so tightly
that her head seemed likely to explode if she ever took the pins
out of her severely tied-back hairdo. Her nastiest act in "Mother
Love"? I'd say the time she baked poisoned cookies and gave
them to her ex-husband's little children. TV Critic Marvin Kitman
hailed Rigg's Helena as "the bravura performance of the
century." I'd say her Helena Vesey has a good chance of
being TV's baddest mom for two consecutive centuries. |
|
2.
JOAN CRAWFORD of "MOMMIE DEAREST" |
Poor Joan
Crawford had this fabulous movie career that took her from silent
screen chorus girl in the 1920s to horror movie diva in the 1970s,
but with some incredibly strong dramatic performances in between,
especially in her Oscar-winning performance as James Cain's "Mildred
Pierce" in 1945. But her daughter, Christina, wrote a book
called "Mommie Dearest" that portrayed Crawford as
a mean-spirited child-abuser who locked her kids in closets and
made this really horrendous fuss if they ever dared use "wire
coat hangers!"
Faye Dunaway played Crawford in the 1981 movie version in such
a juicily flamboyant she-monster style that the movie is now
a camp classic. It's said normal kids now start to cry at the
very sight of Crawford's face. |
Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford |
|
3.
MRS. ISELIN of "THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE" |
|
In her Oscar-nominated
1962 performance as Mrs. Iselin in John Frankenheimer's "The
Manchurian Candidate," Angela Lansbury created one of the
screen's most cruel and heartless moms--the wife of a right-wing
U.S. Senator, conspiring to use her troubled son (Laurence Harvey),
who was brainwashed by the commies while he was a prisoner during
the Korean War, to carry out a series of political assassinations
that will help her husband's career. The son might have been
a brain-dead zombie, but Mrs. Iselin was a soul-dead itchbay.
On top of that, she didn't even talk nice to the poor sod. At
one point she asks him, rather rudely if you want my opinion,
"Why do you always have to look as if your head were about
to come to a point?" Hey, if my Mom had ever asked me that,
I'd never have bought her that copy of "The Wit & Wisdom
of Rush Limbaugh" for Mother's Day. |
|
4.
MRS. ROBINSON of "THE GRADUATE" |
|
For all those
guys who wonder how on Earth Anne Bancroft's sexy Mrs. Robinson
in "The Graduate" could be considered a "mother
from Hell," consider this: Put yourself in her daughter's
place. Mrs. Robinson came on to Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman), her
daughter's boy friend, and showed him things Moms seldom show
prospective sons-in-laws. How would you feel if your Dad had
sex with your girl friend? (Yuck!) Besides, Mrs. Robinson turned
against Benjamin and pushed her daughter (Katharine Ross) into
marrying somebody else. True, Bancroft's Mrs. Robinson was a
hot number you'd like to meet in a cocktail lounge some night,
but as a Mom you'll have to admit she qualifies for federal disaster
aid. |
Dustin Hoffman resists
his girl friend's sexy mom (Anne Bancroft) |
|
5.
MARGARET WHITE of "CARRIE" |
Crackpot Mom Piper Laurie
comforts her telekinetic teenager (Sissy Spacek) in "Carrie" |
Poor little
Carrie White was raised by Margaret, her twisted Mom, to believe
that all boys were "unclean" sinners when most of us
realize that only 97.5 percent of them fall into that category.
The result was such a naive and pathologically frightened girl
that she actually thought she was bleeding to death when she
got her first menstrual period because she had committed some
loathsome sin. Fortunately, Carrie also had telekinetic powers,
so she was able to pay back Mom and all her abusive high school
classmates in one of the most destructive climaxes ever seen
on a movie screen. For Brian DePalma's movie version of Stephen
King's novel, both Sissy Spacek (Carrie) and Piper Laurie (Mom)
earned Oscar nominations. |
6.
MRS. BATES in "PSYCHO" |
|
For years,
Mrs. Bates sat in her rocking chair and berated her son, Norman,
about one thing or another--but mostly girls and what they were
really after from him. So, little wonder that Norm grew up as
a knife-wielding psychopath who drilled holes in the walls of
every room at the remote Bates Motel, then peeped through them
at any female motorists who stopped there overnight. In Alfred
Hitchcock's classic "Psycho," Norman (Anthony Perkins)
dresses up like his Mom and uses various cutting tools to get
rid of those nasty girls for arousing her simpering son. Don't
think Mrs. Bates was nothing but the rotted husk of his original
Mom. Any woman whose influence was so powerful that she continued
to give orders to Norman long after her death surely must have
been a genuine mother from Hell! |
|
7.
THE ALIEN MOTHER of THE "ALIEN" FILMS |
Alien Mom gets up close
& personal with Sigourney Weaver
In James
Cameron's "Aliens," the first sequel to Ridley Scott's
1979 sci-fi horror extravaganza "Alien," astronaut
Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) first encountered the Mother
of all the alien monsters, rapidly reproducing herself while
ingesting humans and absorbing all their cerebral wisdom. The
duel between Ripley and Ma Alien continued through two more sequels,
finally reaching the point in "Alien Resurrection"
(1997) where Ripley is sort of a hybrid Alien Mom herself. When
it comes to Moms, this one is the ugliest, slimiest, most ferocious
and poisonous of them all. My advice is to not bother sending
Mother's Day cards to any Mom capable of swallowing you whole
or impregnating you with fetuses that accomodate their own births
by ripping giant exit holes in your chest. |
© 2001 by Ron Miller.
You can
comment on this column or contact Ron Miller with an email to:
talkback@thecolumnists.com
 |
RON MILLER
is the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' MYSTERY! TV series. You can buy personally
signed copies of the book through this website at the discount
price of $24 (regular price $27.50), which includes shipping,
by sending your check or money order to: Ron Miller, c/o TheColumnists.com,
P.O. Box 3429, Los Altos, CA, 94024. (Be sure to print out the
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