Big Bad Mama
                                                                       
Director: Steve Carver
Year: 1974
Rating: 6.0
Yes, it's trash-o-rama time! That time of the year when you can just sit back guilt free and watch a film that digs deep into the garbage of humanity and good taste and feel fine about it. Producer Roger Corman throws it all into this one - shoot-outs, bank robberies, nudity, threesomes, Shatner having sex, underage sex, nitwit cops, prostitutes, machine guns, illegal booze, strippers - and that's just a part of it. This is his version of Remember Mama or Mama Knows Best. It is a hoot much of the time and astonishingly stupid all of the time. You have to set this type of film in Red Neck country where good old boys have to try and get a feel of any woman passing by. It has to be accompanied by a twanging banjo like it is the Dukes of Hazzard. My main thought was how in hell did Angie Dickinson get talked into this film and talked into taking her clothes off so often. Did she have bills to pay or had her career which had a lot of respected films in it begun to peter out? In this same year though she began her Police Woman TV series that did fairly well. Maybe she just thought that her role sounded like fun. Robbing and a killing. And rolling around naked.



She lives in hell and gone south Texas during the Depression where the rattle snakes outnumber the people and resemble the men. Her husband is a no show and she is bringing up two teenage daughters in a dirt shack. Her youngest daughter Polly (Robbie Lee, the next year to have the lead in Switchblade Sisters - two cult films in two years) is scheduled to be married to a boy not old enough to drink or enough money to buy one. At the wedding ceremony, Mama breaks it up and makes a get-away in a friend's car. She decides she is never going back. Instead, she enters a life of crime. With her two girls at her side. She can't teach them arithmetic, but she can sure teach them how to shoot a gun.



They are in a bank trying to cash a phony check when two men come in to rob it. In the ensuing confusion and shots, she and the two daughters slip into the cashier's booth and steal all the money. One robber gets killed but the other hitches a ride with them. Fred Diller played by Tom Sherritt. I don't know if they paid him in cash or in ass. He gets to have a sex scene with Mama, then the two daughters at the same time and then rubs up against a naked woman they kidnapped. Mama is the brains and keeps upping their robberies. At one point Shatner shows up as a slick no-account con man that she takes a liking to. I may never get the image of Shatner bending over her from the back having sex and sweating out of my mind. Ever. I half expected him to call out warp speed.



This film fits into the crime films of the time but is really just a good-natured comic sexploitation romp. It was a profitable film for Corman but the sequel didn't come along till 23-years later - starring Angie again as a bank robber. Her two daughters are played by different actresses. Also in this film is Corman favorite Dick Miller as the inept cop chasing after her. It is directed by Steve Carver who was to direct Capone the following year for Corman.