CineBad!!!

I wasn’t quite sure what I was getting myself into with this one. It was “rent 3 get a free sci-fi tape” night at the local video store, and we had 3 picked out, one of them being a sci-fi flick. So I grabbed “Hush” and ran. “What sort of film is this?” I asked myself as I fast-forwarded throught the previews on the tape… If you had any doubts as to the genre of this movie, they were spelled out during the opening credit sequence. The main theme was a slightly ethereal musicbox rendition of “Hush Little Baby” while we see a toy carousel spin around. Rule of Movies #23: music box music means either a) horror movie and/or b) some kid is going to die. I think this film was going for the ‘horror’ option, although a dead kid might have livened up the plot a bit.

We should make a separate category for Mean Mothers! This was a Mean Mother film, expounding on all of the overprotective neurotic mother stereotypes out there. We have Helen (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Jackson (Jonathan Schaech), a lovey-dovey couple. They go to Kilronan, Jackson’s ancestral horse farm/estate for a visit to Jackson’s mom, Martha (Jessica Lange.) Mom turns out to be a strictly weird Catholic with a penchant for tidying up… and more. She eventually sabotages Helen’s diphragm and Helen gets pregnant, which means that now she must marry Jackson.

It gets weirder when Jackson’s grandmother shows up uninvited to Jackson’s and Helen’s wedding and starts dissing Martha. What’s up? Why does Martha keep telling lies about everyone? She’s up to something… But wait! There’s more! Jackson’s father died “accidentally” when a large nail extracting tool somehow accidentally smashed his sternum during a fall. Jackson always thought he was responsible for his father’s “accidental” fall… but was he?

Helen and Jackson move from their yuppie lifestyles in NYC to the farm with Martha. Martha has serious abandonment issues, and decides to feed Helen a strawberry tart laced with some drug used to induce labor in horses. Helen goes into labor and Martha decides to grab the baby and shoot Helen up with morphine “more than a drop of this will kill you!” Martha cackles evilly as she fills the horse syringe up all the way with the drug…

But, as predicted, this movie ends happily, if anticlimactically. Jackson undergoes a serious spur-of-the-moment personality transplant in the last scene and forcefully declares “Shut up!” to his mom, in a heart-wrencing scene, as he suddenly figures out that his whole life has been a lie. And then the happy couple + baby walk away and the movie ends. “What? That’s it?!?” you exclaim to yourself. But yes, that’s it.

This film has many memorable moments. The parable between Helen giving birth and the Jesus birth story is priceless, if almost completely unfounded. Plus, we get gratuitous shots of Martha religiously going to Confession. But wait! In the last scene, the camera goes to the Priest’s side of the confessional, and… it’s… empty! Dum dum. There are also a few powerful exclamations of the word “bitch!” and many predictable plot points. Many Rules of Movie Making apply here, see if you can count them all. I forgot another one: Rule of Movies #10: when a female tosses her cookies it means she’s pregnant. Rule #89: Nuns are always Irish (the Irish nun in this film, Sister O’Shaugnassy was played by the very Irish actress Kaiulani Lee). I could go on and on…