Mother's Day

If the psychological thrills in Mother's Day revolve to a degree around the absence of a father figure amongt the criminal Koffin clan, then it is perhaps no less fitting than curious that the film's director Darren Lynn Bousman (Repo! The Genetic Opera and various Saw sequels) should be conspicuously missing from the otherwise thorough extras. Sure, you occasionally glimpse Bousman working with the actors in the 11 minutes of ill-edited, behind-the-scenes B-roll footage, but otherwise he has gone utterly AWOL.

Fortunately, his cast and crew fare somewhat better in his absence than the orphaned Koffins in the feature itself. Instead of a director's audio commentary, we get extensive interviews (nearly an hour's worth in total) with all the main players - Rebecca de Mornay, Jaime King, Patrick Flueger, Warren Kole, Briana Evigan, Matt O'Leary, Shawn Ashmore, Lyriq Bent - as well as producer Richard Saperstein and executive producers Lloyd and Charles Kaufman (the men behind schlock indie production house Troma).

Lloyd refers to his brother's original Mother's Day (1980) as "the seminal – or semen-al – movie" which, with its unusual blend of social satire and gore, kick-started the whole Troma movement. "We liked the title," adds Charles (who now runs a high-end bakery), "It was a perennial." They make a hilarious double-act, and their love for independent cinema clearly remains unabated after all these years. Saperstein states that the whole idea for the remake came from his fellow producer Brett Ratner, who was a fan of the original when he was growing up – and Saperstein adds that what made the production so appealing was its psychological realism, whereby "the villains are as compelling as the victims."

This moral complexity also attracted several of the cast members - especially de Mornay, Kole, O'Leary and Ashmore - who emphasise the film's rich generic texture as a horror, a drama, a thriller, and "a very darkly comic tale of family dynamics" with "a psychological aspect". But for the most part these actors, interviewed on set midway through the production, and evidently asked rather banal questions that have been clumsily effaced, rarely have, let alone take, the chance to get beyond Electronic Press Kit-style sound bites.