Wednesday, September 4, 2019

Ma (2019) - Don't Let Her Drink Alone!


Most people can look back in time to their High School years and recall times they were teased and picked on. Not everybody has the privilege of being popular. Maybe some were way to enthusiastic and passionate about school. Maybe some were just too cool to give a shit. Maybe some just did not belong. Fast forward years later and some people actually do change and have moved onto bigger and better things, and even laugh at those dreaded old days of being teased and picked on. However, there may be that very select few who cannot forgive and forget. That is because the boundaries had been way crossed. A High School prank supersedes anything and everything that is tolerable...

Sue Ann Ellington may come off as cool. I mean if you are looking for someone to buy you alcohol and allow you to party in her basement while underage, then she is definitely your friend. Or maybe the mother you wish you had. Sue Ann now known as "Ma" to teenagers Maggie, Andy, Haley, Chaz, and Darrell, also went to High School with their parents. Yet, she chooses to party with the teens and not her own peers. And why is that? To overcompensate for not being cool back in High School? Is she just that lonely? Or is there a more strange and diabolical reason? What does she want with a bunch of teenagers?

When things get even more weird and freakier as the partying in Ma's basement becomes more frequent, Ma starts stalking the teens after they decide to end their "friendship" with her. Why can't she let go? Why does Ma prohibit her own daughter Genie from interacting with her peers by confining her to a wheelchair convincing everybody she has a degenerative condition? The answers don't just lie with Ma. They lie with her former classmates whose children she is "befriending". 

Ben, who is Andy's father, had been romantically pursued by Sue Ann in High School. The feelings were not mutual and Ben was anything but a gentleman about it. He had lured Sue Ann into a closet under the pretense of wanting her to perform fellatio on him. The room is dark and Sue Ann goes downtown. Once she gets out of the closet, she finds the entire school awaiting her for the laughter and slut shaming. It turns out that it was not Ben who was in the closet with her. It was another young boy. Ben, Erica, and Mercedes, who had helped arrange for the humiliation and is Ben's current lush of a girlfriend, all watch the entire school laugh at Sue Ann. Sue Ann is never the same again. Now the teenagers are suffering for the sins of their parents, as Ma is out for retribution. Mercedes gets run over by her car while jogging, she draws blood from Maggie's dog Louie, and gets Ben to come over to her house to knock him unconscious. She pumps Louie's blood into his body killing him. She traps all the offspring of her bullies into her house, torturing them in the worst way possible. Genie, who is very much healthy and able-bodied, comes to their rescue. Erica comes and helps everybody escape when the basement catches fire. Sue Ann blames Erica for being weak and not doing anything while she was being humiliated in High School. As Sue Ann tries to throw Genie into the fire, Maggie stabs her. Everybody escapes while Sue Ann makes her way upstairs to Ben's body, lies down next to him, as they burn together.

1 comment:

  1. Good plot synopsis. MA is heavily flawed, but it does have a positive message on the importance of choosing not to be the victim.

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