Big Bad Mama: Steve Carver

Four years after making Bloody Mama (1970), one of his last great directorial efforts, Roger Corman produced Steve Carver's Big Bad Mama (1974), another film about a family of outlaws led by a murderous matriarch set against the backdrop of the Great Depression. But whereas Bloody Mama was about a mother and her sons, Big Bad Mama is about a mother and her two teenage, nubile daughters. After her lover dies, Wilma McClatchie takes her children on a whirlwind tour of 1932 Texas, stealing, robbing, and extorting their way to riches. Along the way they meet up with a fiendish bank robber named Fred (who ends up impregnating one of the girls), and a refined gambler played by William Shatner. Together, they decide to kidnap and ransom the daughter of a millionaire as a last ditch effort to make it to easy street. But of course, things don't go as planned. Big Bad Mama is nowhere near as entertaining as Bloody Mama despite an absolutely fantastic performance by Shatner. The film doesn't miss a single opportunity to get the young girls out of their clothes. In fact, the single-mindedness with which it exploits the girls makes one wonder if Russ Meyer didn't ghost-direct the film. It doesn't help that the girls are two-dimensional characters lacking any sort of emotional depth. But even more unforgivably, the film just isn't that interesting. Oh, it's a decent enough distraction with lots of action and mayhem. But it doesn't have the charm or staying power of Corman's earlier film.

6/10