Rent Big Bad Mama (1974)

The Roaring Twenties meet the Sniggering Seventies, and it ain't pretty... - Big Bad Mama review by Count Otto Black

Shot in the dying days of Roger Corman's New World Studios and produced by Corman himself, throughout this desperately cynical attempt to squeeze the last drops of box-office mojo from the withered husk of sixties exploitation cinema you can practically hear the bottom of the barrel being scraped. So naturally that person who thinks "classic" means "every film ever made that I can't think of a word for right this second" has labeled it "classics action", a description roughly as helpful as "car chase shoelace fnibbit bazonka", and a lot less accurate than "worthless garbage." Although the extremely misleading synopsis on the main page, presumably quoted straight from the DVD cover, makes it sound like a tough gangster film along the lines of Corman's "Bloody Mama" from four years earlier, stylistically it's somewhere between Russ Meyer and Benny Hill, minus everything that's entertaining about either of them, but with a few bloody shootouts that clash horribly with the wearily wacky bedroom antics and tired smuttiness which make up the vast bulk of the movie, but could be edited into a trailer implying it was all-action, as opposed to nearly all borderline soft porn because that's a lot cheaper to film.

I almost didn't watch it all the way through, but I had nothing better to do for a couple of hours and I was mildly curious to see what part William Shatner was going to play. By the time he finally showed up the film was half over so I thought I might as well watch the rest of it. Yes, it's that thrilling! Angie Dickinson overacts but doesn't look happy as the feisty redneck title character, who, along with her two dim-witted and oversexed teenage daughters who look happier than she does but can't act, becomes a bank-robber for no particular reason. They take their clothes off. Other people show up. They take their clothes off too. Everyone has carefully-posed non-explicit sex, including Angie Dickinson and Willian Shatner, in a scene which I understand is responsible for this movie being "legendary". Well, if that's all you're interested in, it's about two minutes long and you can presumably find it on youtube, sparing yourself an hour and a half of tedium.

Seriously, this is the pits! The constant naughtiness is too lukewarm to be as outrageous as it thinks it is and just gets in the way. Well, it would if there was a story for it to get in the way of, but there isn't really, except for the kidnap plot which suddenly pops up 15 minutes before the end. The jokes don't work because they aren't funny, ever. The almost non-stop annoying "yee-haw, ain't y'all havin' a good time?" banjo and jew's harp music keeps playing while people are being bloodily gunned down as if they couldn't be bothered to change the record. And to round out your evening's entertainment with a touch of eyestrain, this is such a low-quality video-to-DVD transfer that most of it's ever so slightly out of focus. By this point in his career Roger Corman simply didn't care, and neither should you.