An early horror release from Troma, the low-rent production and distribution company set up in New York in 1974 by Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz, Mother’s Day was widely pilloried by the critics at the time of its release for its violence against women – the British Board of Film Censorship went so far as to ban it from cinemas outright though it later turned up on video. Seen today, the film pales beside some of the more excessive examples of the slasher or “torture porn” sub-genres but it’s still an unpleasant film that can never quite make its mind up if it expected us to take it seriously or not.

The pre-credits sequence sets the not-quite-right tone of the rest of the film, with its cheap gore effects, witless comedy and a nasty misogynist streak a mile wide. An elderly woman in a neck brace, identified only as “mother” (veteran television actress Beatrice Pons, credited here as Rose Ross), attends a self-help therapy group and offers a ride to a young couple, Terry (Luisa Marsella, credited as Marsella Davidson) and Charlie (Stanley Knapp). The car seems to stall in the woods but it’s all a trap – Charlie is decapitated with a machete and Terry assaulted by mother’s two brutish sons, Ike (Gary Pollard, credited as Holden McGuire) and Addley (Michael McCleery, credited as Billy Ray McQuade – the fact that so many actors in the film opted to hide behind pseudonyms speaks volumes). Elsewhere, Trina (Tiana Pierce), Abbey (Nancy Hendrickson), and Jackie (Deborah Luce), three college friends, are preparing for their annual “mystery weekend” trip, Jackie leading them deep into the woods for a camping break in the “Deep Barons” (it’s hard to tell if the misspelling of Barrens as Barons on a signpost is a joke or ignorance.) They soon fall foul of “mother” and the boys who abduct the, take them back to their isolated home and torture and rape them. They eventually escape and plan their bloody revenge – but all the while, mother is terrified of Queenie, her long lost sister who she believes is living a feral lifestyle in the woods and is coming for her…

Mother’s Day was directed by Charles Kaufman, Lloyd’s brother, who had previously written gags for Bob Hope and directed the porn film The Secret Dreams of Mona Q (1977) and who soon give it all up and start baking instead, to great success – today he runs the Bread & Cie bakery in San Diego that he opened in 1994. It seems that bakery has served him rather better than film-making though Mother’s Day enjoys enough of a cult following for it to have been remade in 2010 by Darren Lynn Bousman (best known perhaps for his association with the Saw franchise) with Rebecca De Mornay in the Rose Ross/Beatrice Pons role.

Often described as a slasher, even by Kaufman himself, it’s really more of a backwoods massacre film, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) by way of Day of the Woman/I Spit On Your Grave (1978), and with a dash of the urban/rural class warfare of Wes Craven thrown in but without the saving graces of any of them. Kaufman claimed that the film was meant to be a comedy, but the satire is too blunt, too unfocussed and its targets to easy (self-help groups, the supposed negative effects of popular culture and there seems to be a particular distaste for mothers and motherhood running throughout – it feels like someone was working through a few issues) to be really effective. It wants so hard to skewer consumerism and pop culture doesn’t have anything incisive or even insightful to say about either. Is it saying that the brothers were adversely affected by their exposure to television and “junk” culture, that television was awash with sexual violence in the 1970s (despite what detractors will try to tell you, it really wasn’t)? Or is it telling us that their existing predilections made mass entertainment more attractive to them. Either way it seems a cheap shot and one that isn’t aimed terribly well.

All of the men in the film are varying degrees of obnoxious, from the mansplaining jerk and lecherous old goat at a Hollywood party to Jackie’s creep of a boyfriend, from a lairy street drunk to the brothers themselves. It’s been suggested in some quarters that Kaufman and his co-writer Warren Leight (who went on to write episodes of the various incarnations of the Law & Order TV series) were trying to something of a feminist bent but the evidence doesn’t really bear this out. By the time they’re abducted, we’ve learned just enough about the women to give only the slightest damn about them, so their vengeful fightback is a purely visceral one. We don’t really care all that much about them except on the basic of levels, though one has to admire the ingenuity of their revenge weapons of choice – among their armoury are a television set, a can of drain cleaner, a clawhammer, an electric carving knife, an aerial and set of fake inflatable breasts. Freudians would have a field day.

The brothers are broadly played by Pollard/McGuire and McCleery/McQuade, so much so that they ultimately become cartoonish buffoons, their idiotic bumblings tending to somehow lessen the atrocity of their crimes. And in the end their revealed to be not only morons but lily-livered mummies boys, doing what they’re told – though the motivation for mother’s misogyny is never explained.

The final shot is one of the most memorable but also one of the silliest twist endings in early 80s horror. Kaufman played fair and signalled it several times throughout the film but some ratty make-up completely ruins the effect he was going for and it now just completely daft. It sums up the film really – trying to keep feet in two camps, inviting audiences to recoil in horror from the violence and the gore yet at the same time laugh at it and it never gets it right.