Review of Mama (2013) by Spangle — 04 Aug 2016

Mama is just a bad movie. The scenes that are intended to be scary are instead unintentionally scary, the characters suffer from being massively stupid, and the supernatural entities motives make no sense.

Even worse, one of the little girls is truly grating. Jessica Chastain is ok and Andres Muschietti does a fine job creating tension and a scary atmosphere, but the film never goes far enough to elicit scares.

The film puts you on edge, but then pulls the rug from under you and leaves you wishing it had actually followed through on something for once. Horror films that lack a pay off are typically okay in my book because the atmosphere is scary enough and the things that are intended to scare you, actually do.

With Mama, however, the plot and story is so laughably bad, none of these things scare you. The characters are thinly written and past and fall apart with the story around them making no sense and just being a nonsensical compilation of "best scenes in a horror movie" type situations, except the scenes here are so obviously trying to be scary, they fail to do anything at all.

Mama is a horror film made by someone who loves horror, but has no idea what makes them work.