Have Yourself A Toxic Mother's Day

 

Hey, hey, Horror Nuts! Welcome to another edition of WTFHM!

This one goes out to the toxic parents out there. Yeah. I'm talking to you.  What the hell is wrong with y'all?

And that is not a rhetorical question. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!

Like, okay, you know that the little human that fate has put you in charge of is, like, human. Just smaller and more helpless than you...right? They're not the reason he/she left you or the reason your car won't start. They don't cry to punish you for your stretch marks. I mean...

Look, I know there are a lot of people out there that have real-world problems that are hard to deal with, but if those real-world problems make you think that it's okay to take it out on your kid...???

Seek help. Immediately. In the meantime, let's talk about This Week's Movie:

Umma starring Sandra Oh, Fivel Stewart, Dermot Mulroney, Odeya Rush, MeeWha Alana Lee, and Tom Yi.

This is Amanda(Oh). Amanda is a single mother and owns a pretty successful beekeeping business with her daughter Chris(Stewart).

Amanda has some issues. Specifically with electricity. She really can't deal with it. Thunderstorms freak her out. She doesn't have any electricity in the house and, in fact, she's banned it from her farm.

Like if you go to visit her, you gotta leave your phone in the car...and you gotta park your car a ways away and walk up to the house because there's a sign saying:

Anyway, one day, a car comes barrelling onto the farm. The driver turns out to be Amanda's Uncle Kang(Yi), who came straight from Korea to see her. After spending the first few minutes of seeing his niece for the first time in who knows how long judging her, he gives her the news that her mother passed away and he's brought her an eerie suitcase. She promptly throws him out.

Meanwhile, Chris is feeling some type of way about living out in the sticks without electricity because, you know, she's a sane teenager. 

And all while Chris is starting to see glimpses of a normal life that she really, really wants to live, Amanda is becoming increasingly haunted by her dead mother. 

Which, admittedly, becomes an even bigger problem when Chris breaks into her mother's basement hidey-hole and finds the suitcase and all these items from Amanda's past life.

That forces Amanda to tell Chris about her mother...and about the fact that she lied to her about where she came from. Chris is upset about it, but, yeah, she deals with it. Mom also tells her that her mother was really abusive to her as a child (It's a bigger story than just that, but that's how it shakes out ultimately) and that's why she ran away. Understandable.

Everything's everything until Amanda has her friend/accounting guy Danny (Mulroney) over with his niece, River(Rush), and River pulls out a cell phone that she had on her the whole time.

Chris now doubts that her mother was ever sick from the electricity. She also finds that her college application is all messed up, so she confronts her. That goes really bad and Chris dips out.

Angry that the ghost of her mother has been messing with her and Chris and ruining their relationship, she buries her mother's picture and ashes and, given that in the rulebook of "Pissing off a Ghost 101" the first chapter specifically states not to dump the remains disrespectfully in a hole and bury them, it goes about how you'd expect.

Anyway, Umma gets the shit beat out of her and then choked out. Umma decides to take that opportunity to take over her body.

When Chris gets home, everything in the house is changed up. All the pictures are of her mother with Umma. When she finds her mother, her mother's, well...possessed. And Chris becomes aware very quickly that there was a very good reason why her mother dipped out and never looked back.

Yeah, so, Chris ends up battling her Umma/Mom and this thing:

(It's a dark picture, I know. It's a badly rendered fox with a lot of tails. There was no way I wasn't gonna mention that.)

Anyway, Amanda comes back to herself for a minute, then gets dragged into her mother's...consciousness(?) and confronts her mother, which...I wasn't really mad at.

I'm not mad at it because she does what a lot of us aren't really trying to do with our toxic parents. She just stands up to her.

She basically tells her, "Yeah, it sucks that you gave up your career and married a man who brought you to America, then left you. And it sucks that you ended up being a single mom and you couldn't speak English and couldn't get any help. But that doesn't mean you get to use me as a punching bag..."

She returns to the land of the living and she and Chris give her a proper burial ritual. Chris moves on with her life and goes to college and all is right with the world.

The moral of this story?  If your kids have stopped talking to you, get your ass into therapy. Take those meds and get your head straight. 

Real talk, therapy might be hard to do, but it's way easier than haunting your damn kids after you die.

I'm also gonna be a maverick and give this one a jewel.

I say maverick because apparently, no one else liked this one. Not sure why because, save the bad CGI Kumiho, this wasn't a bad horror movie by any stretch of the imagination. It wasn't gory and the scares were generally low level, but it wasn't bad. 

Like, I'd designate this one a high tier one in that I wouldn't show grandma (unless I didn't like her very much and I was trying to send a message), but it's not really nightmare-inducing enough for me to put it in the tier two category.

Annnyway, next week's movie is going to X. A movie combining horror and porn stars, something that has never been done before ever in the history of the world. *snicker*

See you next week!

O~
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