Mary Had A Little Lamb – Review
Not Rated
Written by Harry Boxley
Directed by Jason Arber
**NOTE: this post may be updated with audio once we actually have the chance to talk about it. Until then, you can read Mark’s review below. Remember, though, you can listen to all our discussions of this and every other movie directly over on ACAST. Stay tuned.**
Synopsis:
A radio host and her crew set out to discover the truth behind some disappearances for a true crime show. They will soon learn that there is far more to discover when they meet Mary and her lamb. Who will make it out alive of this house of horrors?
In the wake of the arguably-successful Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, we are now experiencing a spate of nursery-rhyme/fairy-tale film adaptations not seen since the heyday of Walt Disney.
Unfortunately for us, these ones are all horror films, not adorable little cartoons.
You can guess where this is going, right?
Imagine, if you will, that A24’s Lamb, instead of trailing off into a surrealistic fable, instead effectively turned itself into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
I’m not kidding. There’s even an homage to the chainsaw spin.
That said, there is an interesting idea here, contained in the idea that Mary actually “had” a little lamb, but one that wasn’t nearly so appealing. What might life be like for such a lamb, and his mother, living in a state of imposed isolation?
Well, here we get a mother desperate for an actual family to surround herself and her lamb, a family she would do anything to get… and even worse things to protect.
Pair that with a desperate, opportunistic media personality, and the film veers slightly into the territory Kevin Smith’s Tusk (a film I really enjoyed), with an exploitative person getting their comeuppance.
Mary Had A Little Lamb is a bit short on character development, though, and all the goodwill I can muster can’t change that. It’s an interesting idea which unfortunately suffers from the most common of indie-horror problems: thinking that if you have enough blood and screams, you can spackle over the rest.
You can’t, and there are countless films to prove that.
But it’s not entirely without merit.
Mary Had A Little Lamb is now available on Digital and DVD and stars May Kelly, Danielle Scott, Harry Boxley, Christine Ann Nyland, Lila Lasso, Mark Sears, Charlie Esquer, Gillian Broderick, and Gaston Alexander.
And remember, if the BEST thing you can say about a movie is that it’s “visually stunning,” then they’ve done something wrong.
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