Mother's Boys (1994)

I like the psycho-thriller sub-genre well enough; these were the wave of psychopath movies that came out in the wake of FATAL ATTRACTION, each offering a differently positioned character - nanny, secretary, lover, boss - who would inevitably turn out to be a raging maniac with homicidal intent. MOTHER'S BOYS offers us a mother from hell, with Jamie Lee Curtis cast against type as a real weirdo.The set up is decent enough: Joanne Whalley-Kilmer is a solid protagonist, easy to sympathise with. Curtis, too, acquits herself well as villain for the change, proving to be one of those love-to-hate characters. There's some interesting psychological set-up with the children involved in this mess, and some good scenes (like that involving the frog).Unfortunately, around the halfway point, things start to fall apart. There's way too much lurid melodrama instead of real meat to the storyline, and it all begins to fall apart with plenty of style attempting to mask real substance. The ending is the worst, contrived beyond belief, but the scenes preceding it are lacking, too. I wanted more incident, more motivation, but instead I got clichés and not a lot else besides.The psycho-thriller genre is an entertaining one, but unfortunately most of the films had the misfortune to be made during the 1990s, a decade which hasn't dated well for cinema. MOTHER'S BOYS is a good example of this.

I quite agree with positive reviews. Apparently they were not among the majority. This appears to be a movie you either love or you hate. Jamie Lee Curtis turns in a fine performance, not over the top more than necessary, full of quiet menace that explodes with enough underneath to make her psychopathy believable. On the surface, she seems in the beginning a normal person. A tic here, a turn of the lip, a set of the eyes, betrays the sickness inside her. The rest of the cast is quite good, though Peter Gallagher is less than stellar, but basically competent. Joanne Whalley is quite believable as was Lynn Redgrave.The one big problem I have is that Luke Edwards as Kes is turned to Jamie's side too quickly. His role is key, but isn't sufficiently developed. It's sketched instead, which is too bad because, in a sense this is as much his movie as Jamie's. For once, perhaps, a film was under rather than over written.The movie deserved better than it got.

It seems the late 80s/early 90s really thrashed the 'attractive woman from hell' storyline to death, from Fatal Attraction, Poison Ivy, Misery, Single White Female, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle etc., MOTHER'S BOYS was chronologically one of the last in the cinematic phase and quite frankly shouldn't have been made in the first place. The whole story has been done to death, This time instead of a one night stand or a new roommate, it is the abandoning mother (Jamie Lee Curtis) who wants her family back and will stop at nothing to get her way, especially when her ex (Peter Gallagher) is dating the assistant principle (Joanne Whalley) of the school their sons are going to. So Curtis's character initially plays the wholesome, reformed mother who has learned from her mistakes and manages to gain time with her sons, managing to manipulate her eldest son against the new woman in their dad's life. Vanessa Redgrave rocks up in a few scenes as the grandmother, and she not only looks out of place but is just too good of an actress to be in such a crap film and part. Jamie Lee Curtis, looking amazing, is a great actress and really tries but fails as the script lacks any development for her character or any character to interest the audience. The film flopped big time at the box office when it was released and was soon welcomed to VHS/late night TV screenings where it belonged. Give it a miss.

This was an interesting movie. Jamie Lee Curtis plays an unbalanced mom, who after leaving her husband and three children, decides to come back to take on the "mom" role once again. This time she has a competitive force, her husbands new fiancé. There was many oddities to this movie such as, the bathtub scene where the 12 year old was a little squeamish toward his mom being in the tub yet had a curious look as his mother walks around naked. Another thing is Vanessa Redgrave played Jude's mom but had her husbands last name. It seemed that Jamie Lee Curtis' character and her son had a strange, a little to close, relationship throughout the movie.