mlraymond Review of Bloody Mama

Bloody Mama (1970)

Over the top Winters performance main attraction of this freak show

[2/10 · 3 December 2006]

I will only say a few words about this almost forgotten sleaze classic from 1970. At the time, it represented some kind of point of no return for bad taste movies, and could still hold its own today. The most memorable viewing I ever had with this marathon of perversity, loosely based on the exploits of Thirties bank robbers the Barker-Karpis gang, was at a college film society in the early Seventies. The movie was so depressing and grim on the one hand, and so ludicrously , deliriously over the top on the other, that by the end, the audience was either numb from all the slaughter and cruelty, or laughing uproariously at things we knew weren't really funny. A couple of sequences near the end made the biggest impression. An old black man at a Florida tourist camp greets the newly arrived gangsters, and tells them about a legendary alligator named Old Joe, that haunts the creeks and lakes nearby. Later, Bruce Dern as his usual manic character ,and another gang member steal a pig, and trail it along behind a boat, hoping to lure Old Joe out of hiding. Meanwhile, sad, dreamy, drug addict son Robert DeNiro dies of a fatal heroin overdose on the riverbank, grieving over his lost love, who Ma had ordered killed. Suddenly, an alligator head appears menacingly in the water behind the boat, and the trigger happy mobsters gleefully blast Old Joe with machine guns. Meanwhile, Ma finds the body of her son on the river bank ,and goes completely wacko, shrieking and keening over her loss, which leads to one of the most unintentionally funny lines I have ever heard. As Ma wails and mourns with some of her other sons, the two guys in the boat proudly announce that they've bagged Old Joe, and Shelley Winters shrieks back at them, " How can you care about that? Your brother's dead, and you're out there playin' with gators!" This brought down the house at the screening I attended, followed moments later by the tearful Scatman Crothers phoning the sheriff to tell about the crazy folks and what they done. Weeping into the phone, the old black man asks rhetorically, " What they done? I'll tell ya what they done: they stole ma pig, and then they went and killed Old Joe!" Once again, this tragic moment caused total hilarity in the audience. This movie almost defies analysis. I cannot recommend it, unless you're a die-hard fan of Roger Corman or Shelley Winters. It is truly unforgettable, which is not a good thing, in this case.