Mom begins at night in the middle of nowhere, at what looks like a wooden building in the desert. A pick-up truck pulls up & an angry Father chucks his slutty daughter Virginia Monroe (Claudia Christian) out & leaves her there, but she isn't alone as the shadowy figure of Nestor Duvalier (Brion James) watches her from a short distance. Virginia tries to make conversation but as she grinds a cigarette out under her Leopard print, thigh high, high heeled boots Nestor grabs her by her throat & drags her off into the darkness. Nestor then rips her top open, turns into a monster & starts to eat her innards. Virginia is the latest victim of a serial killer that have Lieutenant Carlo Hendrix (Art Evans) & the LAPD baffled, or at least that's the message a local TV news reporter named Clay Dwyer (Mark Thomas MIller) is telling his viewers. Clay is happily living with his pregnant girlfriend Alice (Mary Beth McDonough) & therefore his Mother Emily (Jeanne Bates) has a spare room going which she decides to rent out to the 'blind' dark sunglass wearing Nestor. Unfortunately for Emily she accidentally knocks Nestor's sunglasses off which reveal he has strange coloured eyes, Nestor then turns into a monster again & bites Emily turning her into a flesh-eating monster just like himself. Nestor takes Emily out to train her, they find a suitable homeless bum (Rory VanSaint), murder him & eat his guts but Emily's son Clay has witnessed the whole thing & he must choose between doing what is right & his love for his Mother who now just happens to be a grotesque bloodsucking & flesh-eating monster!

Edited, written & directed by Patrick Rand I thought Mom was a pretty awful film. Looking at some of the other comments on the IMDb & the genre listing it has been given it appears many seem to think that Mom is a comedy horror. Well I can tell you now that I didn't see any comedic elements in Mom at all because there aren't any, unless they are very subtle. The only thing that I can assume is that people see comedy in the actual situation which Mom presents, that being an old lady turning into a flesh-eating monster & the predictable problems & emotional angst that it causes to her son who finds out. There are no jokes (apart from naming a prostitute Beverly Hills (Stella Stevens)), slapstick humour or anything even remotely funny in the film itself & as far as I could see it is played totally straight throughout it's 90 minute run time. So with there being no comedy in Mom that must mean there's lots of horror right? Wrong, Mom sucks & is painfully slow to watch especially after the first thirty odd minutes which consist of Nestor turning into a monster a couple of times, biting Emily, showing her how to hunt for food & Clay finding out. Until this point Mom was moving at a fairly decent pace, had some OK special make-up effects & had me interested, unfortunately Mom runs for another hour which is basically the emotional crap suffered by Emily's Son, the eventual breakdown of his marriage & him being torn between love for his Mother & the fact that she's a flesh-eating monster. This part of the film is incredibly slow, boring & as dull as dishwater even having the nerve to resort to a clichéd role-reversal scenario where Clay tells his Mom to go to her room & stay there locking the door behind her, telling her off & putting bars over her window so she can't escape her room. Mom's script totally ignores the monsters origins & ask's us to just accept that this thing exists without giving a single reason why we should, no matter how silly an explanation might have been I think some background to the monster would have helped. Technically Mom is bland & cheap looking, although I can't say it's badly made it's very average stuff all the way with nothing that particularly impresses or anything with which I could make fun of to pass the time. The special make-up effect's on the monster are OK but their used in very quick flashes, blink & you'll miss them. Don't be fooled by any fancy video box artwork like I was, the monster is only in it three times maximum & all of those are within the pacey first thirty minutes. There isn't much gore either, a severed arm, some brief intestine eating, a burnt body & a drill in someone's arm is all we get. The acting is OK but please Mr. Brion James what is that dodgy accent all about!? At least James had the good sense to know he was in crap & sensibly opted to be killed off early on in the proceedings, everyone else are nobodies expect the black Lieutenant who was also a black police officer in Fright Night (1985) but you may recognise him from Die Hard 2 (1990), he made Mom & Die Hard 2 in the same year?! Talk about opposite ends of the spectrum! Overall there is nothing by which I can really recommend Mom as a horror film & it certainly isn't a comedy as far as I'm concerned. Very poor, very disappointing & yet again I've been conned by fancy video-box artwork with lots of stills of cool looking monsters. Definitely one to avoid.

Sentiment: negative