Bloody Mama

This is supposed to be sort of a true story. Shelley Winters stars as Ma Barker who, with her perverted, animalistic and sadistic sons, goes around the country robbing, raping and killing. There is decent acting in the flick, but only by a very young Robert DeNiro. Shelley Winters never was much as an actress. Bruce Dern is pretty decent in his role as well, but he seems to excel in bizarre character roles. There is plenty of totally senseless violence, and these people are depicted as just totally evil. At no point in the film can you feel anything resembling pity for this bunch. All in all, this is a poorly made low budget film and pretty much not worth your time. I gave it 2 out of 10 since they throw out votes of 1.

This is probably the most sadistic movie I've ever seen. It was disturbing, gross, and unnerving. I saw part of it a few years ago but watched the entire thing on the Action Channel last night and I have to say to myself "what the hell did I just watch?" It was morbid how Ma Barker threw the chubby elderly lady off the side of the car after the bank robbery and disgusting when one of her sons (was it one of her sons) went to have sex with Ma because she said "she's ready for him" and when Llyod (was it him...it was the junkie son) had that girl tied up and (you can assume) raped her then they drowned her in the tub and dumped her body in that lake...how sadistic! Then when they moved on down to Florida and threw that baby pig in the water for the alligator to eat it and when the alligator came around and ate the pig they shot it's brains out....that was extremely unnerving and morbid. The shootout was a gore fest (not so much until her son, forgot his name, kills himself and you can literally see his brains fly everywhere for a split second.) And what was with the crowds of people watching on the side? (I know they did it in the 1800s, families would go down with their wagon and picnic baskets to watch it like it was a play but this was supposed to be the 1930s!) I don't recommend this to anyone. I can come to decide on a rating for it so I just won't rate it.

This movie was my introduction to Roger Corman. I am now hooked. I think other posters have put too much emphasis on accuracy and technique. Sure the plot is not always logical and some of the performances are not great. I find that classics like Bloody Mama are so fun because the director and actors are aware that the film is not Oscar-caliber but still have fun with it. What makes this film so great is that it is a disturbing,campy, slapped-together mess. I would also like to point out that the always great Don Stroud has said in interviews that he had an intense affair with Shelley Winters during the filming of Bloody Mama. As they played a creepy mother son duo, this little morsel of trivia adds a whole new level of disturbing to this fabulous film.

Some movies romanticize the life of crime, or make the criminals into sympathetic characters, but Roger Corman's "Bloody Mama" goes in the opposite direction with its depiction of the Barker crime family of the 30's and their ruthless murders, sadism, incest, drug addiction, and insanity. It's a morbidly colorful mixture of negative southern poor white trash stereotypes, encapsulated in a family of sociopaths, with a vintage Shelly Winters bringing her trademark intensity to the role of Ma Barker and a great cast as her sons and their associates, including Don Stroud, Robert Walden, Bruce Dern, Diane Varsi, and Robert DeNiro. A mishmash of humor and repugnancy, it's definitely not for the squeamish.

Fun movie about a gun toting Ozark clan that rebels against their Depression-era poverty by stealing, threatening, robbing banks, kidnapping, and killing their way into infamy. The clan's leader is colorful Ma (Kate) Barker (Shelley Winters), self-confident, forceful, and determined to get some high-style living for her and her four boys, whatever is required. Interspersed through the plot are real-life B&W flashbacks to the 1920s and 30s, which enhance a sense of realism, as does the casting of non-actors in minor roles in some scenes. The dialogue is at times clever, like during one of the B&W flashback scenes when, in V.O., Ma tells us: "1929 was a bad year for a lot of folks. The rich men was jumpin' out of the windows and, as usual, they fell on the poor". In addition to clever dialogue, Shelley Winters makes the film fun, mostly as a result of her over-the-top Southern accent. And there's something quite ironic about her character. For all of Kate's gun-loving ways, she's actually quite religious and anti-war. In one sequence, she sits down at the piano to play, and starts singing a song to spark some life into her four dejected sons; they eventually join in. "I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier; I brought him up to be my pride and joy … there'd be no war today, if mothers all would say, I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier", which also sums up her familial bond with her sons. The film's color cinematography is acceptable, though nothing special. Prod design and costumes seem accurate for the era, though Shelley's long eyelashes look more like something from the 1960s than the 1920s. The film's songs are good; I really like that title song. A lot of viewers don't like this movie, for a variety of reasons. No, it isn't a realistic portrayal of the real Ma Barker. And no, the story is not altogether accurate, though some plot points are. But it's a fun movie and worth watching, mostly for the entertaining performance of Shelley Winters.

This is an amazing film for 1970, and a good film to watch by itself today. A true gangster story, with no romantics at all. Evil people do evil things, they just do them because they are stupid and degenerated. No social comment is being made, and this is actually the best decision the script writer and the director could make. Only a completly social careless society can let such people 'enjoy the freedom', with the execution squad being the only 'educational tool' it knows. The viewer gets it by itself. The mix of documentary with the true story is discrete and smart. I liked the movie, and gave it 8/10 on my personal scale.

C-movie director Roger Corman rides the Bonnie & Clyde wave and makes his own movie about white trash criminals on a violent crime spree through hillbilly country. So instead of Corman's usual cheap exploitation of beautiful women with heaving bosoms, or cold war garbage about alien invasions, we have over-fed Shelley Winters and her half-wit spawn creating havoc. Winters could be a decent actress under the right director, but left to her own devices she's a Thanksgiving hambone. The supporting cast doesn't do much better, including a young Robert DeNiro who, in a bit of art imitating life, plays a gibberish-spouting drug-addict. Pat Hingle and Scatman Crothers are the only cast members who retain their dignity. This movie is so gratuitously violent it halfways made me long for a return of the Hays Code just so it could be shoved back in a vault. But I'm sure it was fun at the drive-in, assuming you brought enough liquor for everyone.

The late, great, sorely missed Shelley Winters really lets it all hang out with her savage, forceful and brave portrayal of notorious Depression-era crime matron Kate "Ma" Barker, who along with her twisted sons embarks on a wild anything-goes crime spree in the Deep South. Her ungodly dysfunctional brood includes a scrawny and sweaty Robert De Niro as a pathetic heroin addict, Don Stroud as a volatile, temperamental brute, and Robert Walden of TV's "Lou Grant" fame as a sniveling passive homosexual with dominating Bruce Dern as his gay lover (!). Expertly directed by legendary B-movie maestro Roger Corman from an unsparingly harsh and caustic script by Robert Thom (who also wrote the acrid screenplays for "Wild in the Streets," "Death Race 2000," and "The Witch Who Came from the Sea"), this squalid whitetrash crime melodrama packs one hell of a mean and lingering punch. Kudos are in order for the uniformly excellent acting from a first-rate cast, with especially praiseworthy work by Pat Hingle as a rich businessman who's abducted by the dastardly Barker clan and Diane Varsi as a hardened, much-abused hooker. A very young and skinny pre-stardom De Niro is a real stand-out as a pitiful junkie who resorts to sniffing glue when he can't find any smack to shoot up. (Winters actually recommended to Corman that he cast De Niro in this role.) The conclusion likewise rates as a total corker, with Winters maniacally ranting and raving like an absolute lunatic as the police surround the Barker house. Winters also played Ma Barker on the "Batman" TV show. This gritty gangster gem rates highly as one of Corman's best and most underrated movies.

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.

This film is Roger Corman and Sam Arkoff's answer to "Bonnie and Clyde". But not only did they take the theme of Depression-era gangsters, they also borrowed the idea of completely eradicating the facts. I would be hard-pressed to name one thing in this film that was based a real event. That being said, it has some historical merit. Shelley Winters gives a good performance, and has said she was proud of the film (which she oddly enough promoted as a film denouncing violence, despite its clearly violent nature). She even allegedly took a punch to the face, resulting in a nose injury bad enough to get X-rays. Bruce Dern and Robert DeNiro give some of the earliest performances of their careers, and any DeNiro fan who has not seen him in this is really missing out on his humble beginnings. These days, he is past his prime, making cheesy comedies. But have you seen him before his prime? Perhaps most interesting, this was the big-screen debut of cinematographer John A. Alonzo. While he may not be well-known, he did go on to film "Harold and Maude", "Chinatown" and "Scarface" and snagged an Oscar nomination. Not bad for a graduate of the Corman School.