Leofwine_draca I like the psycho-thriller sub-genre well enough; these were the wave of psychopath movies that came out in the wake of FATAL ATTRACTION, each offering a differently positioned character - nanny, secretary, lover, boss - who would inevitably turn out to be a raging maniac with homicidal intent. MOTHER'S BOYS offers us a mother from hell, with Jamie Lee Curtis cast against type as a real weirdo.The set up is decent enough: Joanne Whalley-Kilmer is a solid protagonist, easy to sympathise with. Curtis, too, acquits herself well as villain for the change, proving to be one of those love-to-hate characters. There's some interesting psychological set-up with the children involved in this mess, and some good scenes (like that involving the frog).Unfortunately, around the halfway point, things start to fall apart. There's way too much lurid melodrama instead of real meat to the storyline, and it all begins to fall apart with plenty of style attempting to mask real substance. The ending is the worst, contrived beyond belief, but the scenes preceding it are lacking, too. I wanted more incident, more motivation, but instead I got clichés and not a lot else besides.The psycho-thriller genre is an entertaining one, but unfortunately most of the films had the misfortune to be made during the 1990s, a decade which hasn't dated well for cinema. MOTHER'S BOYS is a good example of this.

Neil Welch Imagine a drama about a woman who abandoned her husband and children. The husband rebuilds his life with a good new woman. Then, years later. the errant wife returns with no warning, expects life to continue as it had done before, and takes it extremely badly when the husband makes it clear that she has no place in his new life.Imagine this scenario presented on screen as a fine, gripping drama. And now forget it, because that that's not what you're getting here.No, what Mother's Boys gives us is the most lurid melodrama imaginable, topped off with a performance of hysterical malevolence from Jamie Lee Curtis.The whole thing is so overblown, particularly the climax (which can, with justification, be called something of a cliffhanger), that hindsight encourages one to view it as, perhaps, something of a comedy - whether deliberate or inadvertent is open to debate.Overall, it's rather fun. But it's not subtle.

Carcrazy1124 This was an interesting movie. Jamie Lee Curtis plays an unbalanced mom, who after leaving her husband and three children, decides to come back to take on the "mom" role once again. This time she has a competitive force, her husbands new fiancé. There was many oddities to this movie such as, the bathtub scene where the 12 year old was a little squeamish toward his mom being in the tub yet had a curious look as his mother walks around naked. Another thing is Vanessa Redgrave played Jude's mom but had her husbands last name. It seemed that Jamie Lee Curtis' character and her son had a strange, a little to close, relationship throughout the movie.

James Hitchcock This is one of the numerous "…..from Hell" movies which came out in the late eighties and early nineties following the success of "Fatal Attraction" (one-night-stand-from-Hell). Others in the genre include "Pacific Heights" (tenant-from-Hell), "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle" (nanny-from-Hell) and "Single White Female" (flatmate-from-Hell). "Mother's Boys" controversially presents us with Jamie Lee Curtis as the mother-from-Hell.Robert Madigan is a single father with three young sons. The reason he is single is that three years ago his wife Judith ("Jude") left him without explanation and disappeared from his life and that of the boys. Robert now has a new girlfriend, Callie, whom he intends to marry as soon as his divorce from Jude can be finalised. Jude, however, has other ideas. She reappears in Robert's life as abruptly as she disappeared from it and wants to resume their life together. When Robert makes it quite clear that he wants nothing more to do with her, Jude reacts with fury, mostly directed against Callie. Although Callie did not come into Robert's life until after Jude had abandoned him, Jude irrationally blames her for breaking up her marriage and comes to see her as the only obstacle standing between herself and her husband. Jude tries hard to win back the affections of her sons as part of a scheme to get revenge on Callie, even posing naked in front of her eldest boy, eleven-year-old Kes. (This tasteless scene, with its implications of paedophile incest, has come in for much well-deserved criticism. I understand, however, that in Bernard Taylor's source novel the incest was more than just implied. It will not be anywhere near the top of my list of required holiday reading this year).The first part of the film is reasonably interesting, and could have been the basis of a much better film. The two female adversaries are well characterised. (Robert, the main male character, is little more than the prize the two women fight over). Callie, played by the kitten-faced Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, is the cute girl-next door type, far more motherly than the boys' biological mother. (She works as the assistant principal at their school). The home she and Robert intend to share when they are married (the film makes it clear they are not cohabiting before marriage) is a spacious, comfortable house in the country, made of solid wood and stone. Jude, by contrast, is played by Curtis as a seductress, all high heels, tight mini-skirts and bleached-blonde hair, glamorous but hard and brassy. By contrast to Callie and Robert's Country Living style, Jude is a metropolitan type, living in an expensively over-decorated city apartment in an Art Deco block. Her talent for alienating people is such that even her own mother takes Robert's side against her.Whalley-Kilmer was at one time tipped for Hollywood stardom, especially after her fine performance in "Scandal", but never quite seemed to make it. Appearing in too many films like this one was probably the main reason. Jamie Lee, however, quickly bounced back from this setback; her next film was the highly successful "True Lies", in which she once again got to show us just what a fine body she had for a woman in her mid thirties. Peter Gallagher, as Robert, makes a rather bland hero, and Vanessa Redgrave, as Jude's mother, looks as through she can't really understand why she signed on for this film in the first place.From about halfway, however, the film starts to deteriorate and declines into lurid melodrama. I won't set out all the plot turns, but can say that they become progressively nastier and more implausible. Anyone familiar with the moralistic vice-punished-and-virtue-rewarded conventions of this particular genre will be able to work out the broad outlines of the ending. If you want to know the full gory details you will have to watch the film itself, but I doubt if you will find them very edifying. Like several unsuccessful "….from Hell" movies (the more recent "Swimfan" is another example) "Mother's Boys" fails because it tries too hard to shock. 4/10