Joe Bob Briggs - Eli Roth / Last Drive-In

 I took the kids to my mother's house, returned home, had some fish cooked, and turned on The Last Drive-In Friday night. The first film featured for this double feature, shown on the Shudder channel It Came from Shudder, selected by special guest, Eli Roth, was Mother's Day (1980). I'm not that wild and crazy for Mother's Day. The Kaufman clan shot this in New Jersey woods and an abandoned house where a murder once took place. Littered with toys and posters and bedsheets and consumer products that folks alive then would recognize inside the house, decorated as a pop culture reference list of the 70s, the film has a batty mom in a neck brace with two unstable, hyperactive, rapist, Oedipal sons doing their best to please her while also terrorizing women. And three female college chums going on a camping trip eventually are besieged by this family of lunatics, kidnapped, held hostage, with one of the ladies raped and brutalized, soon dumped in a dresser drawer and left for dead. The other two soon get free and seek revenge. Roth loves this film, mentioning to Joe Bob that he once played it for friends at his Bar Mitzvah. You see where Roth brings up a film romance while discussing the proper handling of a rape scene, both a bit uncomfortable and not cool about the ugly one in Mother's Day. Drano in the mouth, a TV set dumped on the head, the teeth of a hammer stabbed in the crotch, needle to the neck, rope strangling, a head chopped off in the back seat of a car, gnarly hand wounds from dropping a friend in a sleeping bag out of a window for an escape, and inflatable boob smothering makeup a slasher checklist fans might reason as enough to give this film a go and even like it. It certainly has that cheap, no-budget aesthetic Troma releases are known for. I rented a lot of Troma releases like this film in the 2000s before streaming and so many are shot on low grade stock at various locations dodging the unions. Their casts often appear and disappear after one or two films. The exploitative elements are there, and those involved rarely make another film again. Mother's Day opens in the city, though, briefly providing us with urban cultural flavor of that era of 1979/1980 society.