Darren Lynn Bousman

  • Mother’s Day (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2022) There are good reasons why many people don’t like horror, and Mother’s Day feels like a distillation of those reasons in one handy package. It’s bleak in cinematography and dark in outlook. That, in itself, isn’t that unusual, but where this film takes it one step further in some exceptionally mean-spirited structure that, in the end, doesn’t lead to anywhere but a bleak ending. Building from a home invasion story (itself a rather tired cliché for needlessly dark horror), Mother’s Day occasionally shows glimpses of interest in the way it justifies its conceit. But that’s a very brief moment in a much longer-feeling package that delights in being pointlessly cruel. Our home invaders seem to style themselves after wannabee-jokers of sadistic choices. A repetitive tic of the film is for armed people asking unarmed people to do bad things to each other. It wouldn’t be as bad if it actually gave the impression of leading somewhere, or having some thematic depth to justify it. But there doesn’t seem to be—the best thing one can say about the film is that Rebecca de Mornay is thoroughly detestable as a domineering psychotic mother—but again, the character is so mean-spirited that her transgressions feel like a cheap trick with no point. Director Darren Lynn Bousman has a hit-and-miss filmography, but Mother’s Day doesn’t impress much. It’s basement-level horror without anything that makes the genre interesting.

  • 11-11-11 (2011)

    11-11-11 (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2021) Now that 2000 and 2012 are behind us, filmmakers are going to need to work overtime to find which chronologically spooky year should act as pretext for a big horror/catastrophe film. We’re still too far away from the Epochalypse of 2038, so filmmakers have to come up with something more creative. Or not, as is the case with 11-11-11, a typically underwhelming number-obsessed film that doesn’t do much with a once-a-century opportunity. Blending apocalyptic visions with demons and cultists, the film barely does the strict minimum required of a horror film, and doesn’t go much beyond that. It’s very much like being stuck with a painfully unimaginative crackpot for 90 minutes as he keeps repeating, “Eleven Eleven Eleven… It’s spooky!” over and over again. Writer-director Darren Lynn Bousman did much better movies before 11-11-11 but arguably not since then — in any case, this film is the blandest of bland horror movies, so perfunctory that it barely registers as horrific. It’s easy to imagine a similar film being produced for 00-00-00 or 22-02-02 or any other date in the calendar: there’s nothing special here in concept or execution, and nothing particularly good either.