'MA'.......OCTAVIA GOES BLUM CRAZY........

Ma (2019)    There's two ways to view this movie, another scare-sausage that rolled off the assembly line of the Blumhouse horror factory........

                  It offers the opportunity of a juicy, take-no-prisoners lead role to the supremely gifted actress Octavia Spencer (Oscar winner for "The Help")........as opposed to the supporting or ensemble types of roles she takes in major, mainstream films.......

                  And not surprisingly, she tears into it for all its worth.........playing a pathetic, lonely, but murderously psychotic middle-ager who plays Pied Piper to a bunch of dopey teens.......in order to exact revenge for a vicious high school humiliation she once suffered at the hands of their parents.....

                   In this regard, the movie's really nothing more than millennial update of the 'scary old crone' movies that populated the 1960's.........with veteran icons like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Olivia DeHavilland, Tallulah Bankhead, Joan Fontaine and others gamely trouping their way through cheapjack horror movies..

                    So you either see this movie as a Grade A actress slumming it in a piece of low-rent, cheesy trash........

                      Or you turn a blind eye to the junkiness of it all and concentrate solely on the skill and power of Spencer's performance.......and her ability to elevate this movie out of its pulpy origins.....

                     However you think of the film, you can't take your eyes off Spencer......as she carefully constructs layer after layer of mad fury to her portrayal.   She renders Blumhouse's usual tiresome litany of jump-scares unnecessary........just staying still, staring straight ahead, she's the stuff of nightmares.......

                     As good as she is, Spencer's ultimately at the mercy of the carved-in-stone tropes of  a Friday Night At The MultiPlex horror movie...........the motivation for her monstrous behavior, after all, is no different than what energized most of the killers in the 1980's teen slasher films.

                     Maybe it's fitting that the movie centers around Spencer's basement......which she uses as a lure, gifting  her teen victims with the perfect venue for drinking and petting parties. Even though guided by Tate Taylor, Spencer's "The Help" director, the movie never really gets out of the standard horror basement it's mired in......

                     Woefully unworthy of Octavia Spencer, we'll still shudder out 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2) for
"Ma".......for a top-of-the-line performance that lifts this movie way above its meager scare-tactic intentions.......