The second round of original Amazon Prime Video films under the banner of “Welcome to the Blumhouse” share a common trait of elevated messaging. The mediocre first pair (“Bingo Hell” and “Black as Night”) highlighted poverty, addiction, gentrification, slavery, and racial inequity. The second pair (“Madres” and “The Manor”), premiering a week later, highlight ageism, elder abuse, racism, and gender inequity. It’s a lot. And yet it feels like it adds up to so little.
READ MORE: Welcome To The Blumhouse: ‘Bingo Hell’ & ‘Black As Night’ Are Both Horror Busts [Review]
What’s even clearer after this year’s quartet is that someone involved in this production should convert the format from original feature films to an anthology series a la “Creepshow” or “Masters of Horror.” Once again, the pattern holds wherein a film has 30-45 minutes of good ideas and craft stretched to 80-83. Perhaps, it’s because of how these projects will be sold internationally as features that they must stick to this stretched structure, but every single one of eight films in this series (including four from 2020) would have worked better as an episode of television.
Take “The Manor,” from director Axelle Carolyn. The filmmaker and actress imbues her campy concept with just enough B-movie glee that it would have worked if its truly crazy twist ending had come about 40-45 minutes earlier. And she helps elevate the best floor of this year’s Blumhouse by allowing her two veterans to control the tone when it’s working. That’s exactly what Barbara Hershey does as Judith, a 70-year-old woman who decides to go to a nursing home after suffering a stroke. She doesn’t want to be a burden on her mostly estranged daughter even if her supportive grandson, Josh (Nicholas Alexander), doesn’t understand the decision and doesn’t want to lose his grandma.
It’s not long after Judith arrives at the Manor that audiences know something is wrong. Some of the residents appear to be in a constant state of fright, with the exception of a trio of kind souls led by the charming Roland (Bruce Davison). What do they know that allows them to sleep at night and play bridge during the day while people their age around them are unexpectedly dying? As Judith starts having visions of creatures in the middle of the night, the staff tries to convince her that these are merely early signs of dementia. Could they be right? Or is there more going on here?
Of course, there’s more going on here. It’s a Blumhouse movie. However, the twists of “The Manor” are unexpected, especially in the final few minutes. Until then, Hershey does an admirable job of grounding the film, playing Judith’s fear with an interesting recognition of the inevitable. She doesn’t fight going to the home like characters in stories like this often do, and Carolyn never feels like she’s exploiting the elderly as much as centering them in a way that doesn’t often happen in horror. Her relationship with Josh feels a little forced, but there’s some joy in just watching Hershey and Davison lean into what sometimes feels like an old-fashioned B-movie concept, something that Hammer could have produced. A tighter, episode-length version of “The Manor” could have really worked with talents like this in the spotlight in that its biggest flaw is that, like some cynical old people might say about life in nursing homes, it takes so long to get to the end. [C+]
Director Ryan Zaragoza imbues the first act of his “Madres” with more craft than has been seen in most of the “Welcome to the Blumhouse” movies, which kind of makes its eventual wheel-spinning and manipulative final act all the more frustrating.
It also helps that Zaragoza has a charming lead in the form of Diana (Ariana Guerra), a young journalist who has moved to the California countryside with her husband, Beto (Tenoch Huerta), in the ‘70s. She’s very pregnant, and the creepy old house that they move into has something to tell her. Is the mouthless figure in red that haunts its halls trying to scare her or warn her? There’s clearly something amiss in this community and it’s not just the culture clash between Diana and the people who don’t understand why this L.A.-born woman of Mexican heritage was never taught to speak Spanish. Diana is a classic horror movie outsider with a cultural twist who is thrown into what is almost a “Rosemary’s Baby” set-up in that all of the imagery is clearly designed to stoke her parental fears from a haunted music box to a bloody egg yolk.
The first act of “Madres” hints at a richer, deeper film than the script by Mario Miscione and Marcella Ochoa delivers. Guerra captures the balance between fear and optimism that comes with radical changes in someone’s life—both the relocation from a major city like L.A. to the countryside and her impending childbirth. Huerta also feels genuine in the first act but basically gets pushed aside by the plot for most of the rest of the film. And that plot goes some truly dark places in the final few minutes that can’t be spoiled here but feel pretty cheaply employed. “Madres” turns out to have such incredibly serious subject matter on its mind that it employs statistics and news footage in its final minutes, but one would never expect that from the 80 minutes that precede it. Instead of driving home the point of what’s come before, it feels like an exploitative way to impart a message that should clearly be heard, but maybe for longer than the final minute of a relatively mediocre horror movie. [C]
“Madres” and “The Manor” are both available now as part of the “Welcome to the Blumhouse” franchise on Amazon Prime Video.
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