When it comes to trash, there's the good kind and there's the bad kind. You get a lot of it in horror. Thankfully, Ma is the good kind of trash.
Octavia Spencer makes a four-course meal out of every line of absurd dialogue, devouring every actor who shares a scene with her. Tate Taylor, who directed her to Oscar glory in The Help, has finally found his true calling. It's not prestige movies. It's slick, entertaining nonsense like this and The Girl on the Train. While that film had at least some grander ambition, Ma has no such pretension. It's a Blumhouse production, filmed cheaply in Taylor's native Mississippi, and gets to the creepiness as soon as possible.
Diana Silvers (who's having something of a moment, between this, Glass and Booksmart) plays Maggie, the new kid at school. The popular clique adopt her immediately, taking her to get drunk and high at an abandoned rock quarry. Maggie convinces Sue Ann to buy them booze, and she convinces them to party at her house out of an abundance of caution. It eventually becomes the small town's ultimate party spot, where "Ma" has all the debauchery (and snacks) the kids can handle.
But it takes Maggie entirely too long to realize there's something off about Ma, who reacts violently when they blow her off or snoop around her house. It later becomes clear Ma has a special interest in Erica (Juliette Lewis) and Ben (Luke Evans), the parents of lovebirds of Maggie and Andy (Corey Fogelmanis). To say more would reveal one of the few secrets the film's trailers didn't already spoil. There's also a subplot that makes the least sense of anything in this bonkers movie, but it's a failure of the script, not of the actors.
There's a version of this that's a lot tighter, and a lot more focused on revenge. But the movie's mission statement might as well be this. And in holding true to that, Ma is rollicking good time.
