YEE HAW! HOT DAMN DIGGITY! Ma Barker and boys are on the loose, robbin’ and a slayin’ and a fuckin’ in this nifty little Roger Corman trash classic. If you like incestuous hillbillies and prison sex, Bloody Mama is the moving picture show for y’all. Shelley “Pass Another Ham Hock, I’m Starvin’” Winters has the title role of the criminal gang leader and loving mother of four dim-witted sons, who have anger management issues. What transpires between them can only be called “wrong”…so very wrong. We’re introduced to the happy family with Mama giving some of the (adult) boys a bath in a small metal tub on the front porch while they twitch and bitch about it. Provocative? No. Wrong? Yes!

Eventual A-list actor Robert DeNiro is featured as an angst-ridden heroin addict with Taxi Driver still far…far in his future. This is Shelley Winters’ show though. Winters mugs it up for the camera, emoting strongly whenever something tragic befalls her boys (which is often), reacting dramatically when slapped (she acts like she got hit by Tonya Harding, writhing on the floor like a braying donkey), and gathering the family ‘round the ol’ piano for patriotic sing-alongs after murderous crime binges. During the final epic shootout, she has a meltdown and drools as if Corman was dangling a cream puff just out of the camera’s view.

Mama dotes on her sons, who are the pictures of trash fashion in their overalls worn without shirts. The kids get away with murder, drug addiction and, though implied, probably also sex with just about anything that moves. These guys are retarded! After her eldest son Herman (Don Stroud) commits murder by shoe, Mama brushes it off as him just having “one of those bad moments.” Herman cries whenever he commits a violent act. Stroud tries to chew up the scenery here but he’s no match for Winters who devours it.

Bloody Mama is notable for its cinematic finery. The film is set in the ‘30s, a long time before string bikinis, yet nubile half-dressed starlets walk around the set with visible bikini tan lines from their afternoons in Malibu. At times, the sound is dubbed like a Godzilla flick with lips moving one way and Winters & company having a whole different party elsewhere. Corman goes way out with an implied prison rape, with Bruce Dern, no less, and homosexual innuendos (the rape victim becomes Dern’s boyfriend…and no one seems to notice) on top of the Oedipal sludge. Boy Howdy, how can you go wrong with anal rape, bank robbing, and pounds of Shelley Winters, especially when she’s getting horny with a hostage? You can’t! This one is a keeper. See it with someone you love.

And don’t miss the title song by Bigfoot!