Doug Speirs lists the Top Five Bad Movie Moms for this Mother’s Day

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day, and we all know what that means, don’t we?

It means you need to stop reading this informative and entertaining article and drive to the store to buy your mom a heart-felt greeting card and a heart-shaped box of chocolates.

After all, your mother would do anything for you, just like two moms who have been making headlines lately for their hard-core approach to parenting.

For starters, everyone is infatuated with Toya Graham, dubbed “the Baltimore Riot Mom,” who refused to stand idly when she spotted her teenage son in a crowd throwing bricks and bottles at police.

In a video that went viral, Graham is seen pulling her masked son away, smacking him in the head repeatedly, and delivering a legendary tongue-lashing. “I’m a no-tolerant mother,” she later told reporters. “Everybody who knows me, know I don’t play that.”

Also “no-tolerant” was Columbus, Ga., mom Chiquita Hill, who called police to arrest her 10-year-old son because he was disrespectful to his teacher.

Hill, who posted pictures of her son in handcuffs on Facebook, says she wanted to scare the boy straight, so, naturally, she called 911 and allowed officers to pretend to take him to jail.

While there’s been some debate over what these women did, there’s no argument your mom is a saint and nothing like the monster mothers who clawed their way onto our list of Top Five Bad Movie Moms:

 

5. LADY TREMAINE

THE MOVIE: Cinderella (1950)

THE ACTOR: Voiced by Eleanor Audley

WHY SHE’S SO BAD:

We are talking here about the character famously known as the “Wicked Stepmother” from the 1950 Disney animated classic. We all know the story: Cinderella’s widowed dad marries Lady Tremaine, a cold and cruel woman with two daughters, Drizella and Anastasia, from a previous marriage. When Cinderella’s dad dies unexpectedly, the evil stepmom reduces Cinderella to a lowly scullery maid in her own home, abusing her out of jealousy for her beauty and kindness.

Disney.wikia.com says Lady Tremaine is often considered the most “hateable” Disney villain for her long-term cruelty, committed without any rational motivation or entertaining qualities to offset her despicableness.

“She’s so demeaning that she becomes the ultimate version of the mean mother, an archetype that got copied and pasted almost wholesale into countless other films. If there’s ever a self-involved mother who favours one child over another, you can bet some of her DNA came from Lady Tremaine,” notes blogger Rachel Sanders in an article entitled Ten Terrifying Movie Moms Who Could Use Some Flowers.

 

4. MRS. ROBINSON

THE MOVIE: The Graduate (1967)

THE ACTOR: Anne Bancroft

WHY SHE’S SO BAD:

We will confess feeling guilty putting Mrs. Robinson on this list, because she was the ultimate fantasy for many hormone-addled teenage boys in the days of peace, love and understanding. In the movie, Mrs. Robinson — “Koo-koo-ka-choo” — has an affair with Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman), a recent college graduate who is the son of family friends and the same age as her own daughter, Elaine.

So Mrs. Robinson goes behind her husband’s back, uses the inexperienced Benjamin as a sex toy, and when he eventually becomes disillusioned and falls in love with her daughter, she goes to great lengths to sabotage their relationship threatening to reveal her affair.

Sniffs the movie-review website Rotten Tomatoes: “Mrs. Robinson didn’t just personify the cringe-inducing ideal of the sexually aggressive mom, she was the original cougar, hunting for prey her daughter’s age. She was sultry, mature, had some righteous lingerie — and then refused to share her lover with her daughter.”

At one point, when Benjamin bursts in looking for Elaine, Mrs. Robinson coldly tells him she’s marrying someone else and calls the police, claiming her home is being burgled. You can argue among yourselves whether she deserved to be in the pantheon of horrible on-screen moms, but we’ll just offer this toast: Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson.

 

3. MOMMA LIFT

THE MOVIE: Throw Momma from the Train (1987)

THE ACTOR: Anne Ramsey

WHY SHE’S SO BAD:

It’s hard to beat Momma Lift, the greasy-haired, mean-spirited, tyrannical, raspy-voiced matriarch who earned actor Anne Ramsey an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. In the film, her smother mother from hell, a woman with a face not even a son could love, roars for attention while reviling and beating her cowering son — “Move it, lard-ass!” — with a crutch.

It’s a darkly comic version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train and focuses on an elaborate plot hatched by her son (Danny DeVito), a struggling writer who fantasizes about killing his belligerent mom. He realizes he can’t do it himself so he enlists his hapless writing teacher, played by Billy Crystal, to throw her from a train in exchange for killing Crystal’s ex-wife.

Gushes the Independent Film Channel: “When you cast Anne Ramsey — the woman who played Mama Fratelli, the truly frightening and dangerous crime matriarch in The Goonies — in the role, well, then Momma Lift transcends the page and becomes a much more loathsome creature, the true stuff of Oedipal nightmares and murderous fantasies.”

Ramsey, who died of cancer at 59 mere months after the film came out, once confessed she found some inspiration for the role in her own mother. “My own mother was ill late in her life and became irritable and impatient,” she said.

“She was very demanding… but I’ve never known anyone as rude and awful as Momma Lift… I got all my hostilities out playing the character.”

2. JOAN CRAWFORD

THE MOVIE: Mommie Dearest (1981)

THE ACTOR: Faye Dunaway

WHY SHE’S SO BAD:

Unlike the rest of the bad moms on the list, Joan Crawford was real person, one of the biggest movie stars in Depression-era Hollywood. In 1978, her adoptive daughter, Christina, published Mommie Dearest, the first tell-all celebrity memoir, an explosive autobiography portraying Crawford as a sadistic perfectionist, an alcoholic given to squalls of maternal fury.

In 1981, the book was adapted into a campy film classic starring Faye Dunaway. It shows Crawford inflicting over-the-top discipline including, most famously, launching into a bizarre verbal and physical tirade after discovering the child’s dresses hung on wire hangers. Shrieks Crawford in the film: “No… wire… hangers! What’s wire hangers doing in this closet when I told you: no wire hangers EVER?” It goes on and on, explaining why the phrase “No wire hangers!” has entered the vernacular as code for neurotic instability.

The Independent Film Channel says the film shows Crawford as “one of the most terrifying obsessive-compulsive freaks to ever dwell in Tinseltown.” We’d hide in the closet, but, well, you know.

 

1. MARGARET WHITE

THE MOVIE: Carrie (1976)

THE ACTOR: Piper Laurie

WHY SHE’S SO BAD:

It was tough choosing the Worst Movie Mom of all time, but we’re going with Margaret White, who takes religious fanaticism to terrifying levels in the horror classic Carrie, based on Stephen King’s 1974 novel of the same name.

At school, life sucks for friendless, 17-year-old Carrie (Sissy Spacek). At home, she’s abused by arguably the looniest mom in film history. “School’s a breeze compared to what she has to put up with at home, what with her Bible-thumping cuckoo-bird mama constantly praying for the salvation of her soul, telling her that her budding sexual awakening is ‘dirty’ and often locking her in the closet as punishment for even the slightest infraction,” says the Independent Film Channel.

It’s especially bad when your daughter happens to have telekinetic powers and a bad temper. So Carrie is pushed to her limits, goes to prom, gets covered in pigs’ blood, causes a fire that wipes out her graduating class, then goes home to mom, who, in the middle of a hug, stabs her daughter with a butcher knife.

Carrie’s supernatural powers cause the knives and sharp stuff in the kitchen to hurtle into her uptight mom, crucifying her in the doorway. Piper Laurie, who was nominated for best supporting actress, viewed it as kind of a comedy, and her laughter reportedly ruined several shots. Talk about a bad mom.

 

HI MOM:

This might be a good time to call your own mom and tell her how you feel. We’ll bet the monster moms on our list wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d heard from their kids a bit more. Kind of makes you think.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca

 

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