Mama was a horror. Mother! was a horror. (Make sure not to slur your syllables if you read those aloud) And now, Ma is a horror. Anyone else disturbed by how many mother issues Hollywood has? Might need some therapy there, studios. I suppose I should preface that: Ma is a horror, but calling it such is a somewhat liberal expansion of the definition. Sometimes drama is drama, dig?
Maggie (Diana Silvers) is the new kid in a dead town. Being either lucky or unlucky, she immediately falls into the party crowd. They spend their afternoons hanging out in a van goading one of their number to solicit alcohol purchases from literally any adult who might oblige. This amounts mostly to being ridiculed by the homies remaining in the van. Well, check it out, they caught a fish. The assistant to the local veterinarian, Sue Ann (Octavia Spencer), sorry “Ma” is game to let the kids get their drink on … but only after she makes a mental connection between one of the boys and her past.
Oh, I see, this is one of those Hogwarts towns in which adult peers have all created teen peers. In fact, Maggie’s mom, Erica (Juliette Lewis), tried to break the cycle by moving away … and now she wears a “check her out” costume in the local casino.
Sue Ann isn’t done. She starts offering, unsolicited, to make drink runs for the kids … and then she invites them all to party in her rec room, which makes a fair amount of sense, legal- and safety-wise, from a parental POV (so long as the parents of the kids know this is going on, which they did not). OK, that’s weird. And what’s it to Sue Ann? Why does a forty-something dog-walker want to host party central? Who over the age of forty thirty twenty looks at teen parties and says, “You know what would be great? Hosting!”
So this is where the horror comes in, right? Well, no. Sue Ann’s house continues as party central with the only true hint that this is horror being that Octavia Spencer digs hosting drunk teenagers. OK, I see you have an 
odd plot, but where are you going with it, and why? And when are the kids gonna realize, “This is kinda weird, isn’t it? … I mean adults don’t generally encourage us to drink alcohol, let alone enable such… do they?” No. No they don’t.
There are several misfires in the plotting of the film. By the end, you’ll wonder what Sue Ann’s big plan was, cuz it seemed very spur-of-the-moment for someone who had weeks, months, years to think about it. There’s also the question of Sue Ann’s own daughter, who exists peripherally to the plot despite being another peer of Maggie and her friends. In the end, we’re left with a unique set-up, I grant you, but shaking-my-head execution. What exactly was this film trying to say, and whom do you think it was trying to say it to? Got me. Ma isn’t a bad film, but I have no idea why it got the green light. Were I a studio film executive, I would have invested in 10 Beach Bums before giving this idea a blank check.
Ma has a fascinating collection of veteran actors – Octavia Spencer is cashing in on her recent celebrity; O (“OctoMa?”), if anybody wants to make you a lead in anything, take it and don’t look back. Aside from Octavia, there’s Juliette Lewis as Maggie’s strict no-nonsense mom – oh, sure, when you were a kid raising Hell in Natural Born Killers, that was fine, but now you have standards? That doesn’t seem fair. Then there’s Luke Evans, fresh off playing live action Gaston; turns out even in civvies he’s still a beast. Then fresh off her own nomination, Alison Janney is completely wasted in two minutes of being a shitty boss to Sue Ann. Finally, either Missy Pyle or Elaine Hendrix showed up as Gaston’s floozy proving herself just a tad too old for the role, which is a damn shame because it’s not like these women are getting work as Aunt Catlady.
In the back waters lived somebody’s mom
Hosting parties ‘til she was da bomb
But I’m on to her, man
I can see her dark plan
She wants Dylan to take her to prom
Rated R, 99 Minutes
Director: Tate Taylor
Writer: Scotty Landes
Genre: Horror from the PTA
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Octavia Spencer’s agent
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Impatient horror junkies
