‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ Review: Not So Baah-d [Review]
When titling the document I intended to take notes for Jason Arber’s Mary Had a Little Lamb on, the document name autocorrected from “Mary Had a Little Lamb Notes” to “Mary Had a Little Lamb Bites.” I feared that might be an augur of what was to come. The contemporary trend of horror movies based on children’s stories (e.g. The Mean One, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey) has been widely disheartening. It’s cheap, an easy springboard for concept recognition that scrapes the bottom of the horror barrel. Luckily, Mary Had a Little Lamb is among the stronger entries, though just barely. It doesn’t bite, though it would have been wise to have some.
Par for the course, Mary Had a Little Lamb opens with the titular Mary (Christine Ann Nyland) singing the nursery rhyme while a battered, bruised woman rests on her lap. Leaning heavily into its The Texas Chain Saw Massacre inspiration, Mary and the young woman sit down for a gruesome dinner punctuated by the arrival of Gaston Alexander’s Lamb, a visually compelling yet narratively inert hulking killer. He grunts and dismembers the guests as Mary cheers him on (she’s his mother).
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Cue Carla (May Kelly, uncannily resembling Lindsay Lohan, vocal fry and all), a cold-case podcaster in need of a win. Her dated cases have hemorrhaged viewers, and boss Pete (Mark Sears) gives her just a week to find something more recent or risk losing the show. Never mind the cold case conceit, he wants something new, even though Carla correctly tells him new cases aren’t cold cases. Nonetheless, a serendipitous news reel sends Carla and her podcast crew off to the Warp Woods to investigate a series of disappearances over the years.
Early technical elements distract. Drab interiors, lazy blocking, and regular audial mouth clicks risk derailing Mary Had a Little Lamb before it even starts. Not that expectations were high to begin with, but there is a difference between a bad movie and a bad but enjoyable one. Early-goings are firmly the former, though, because, upon arrival in the woods, Arber and writer Harry Boxley get a little more playful. There’s an incredulous series of events augmented by noteworthy establishing shots and a Hammer Horror-esque sense of atmosphere. It’s English Gothic as the crew arrive and are compelled to stay at Mary’s rural abode, unaware that she’s harboring a killer lamb.
Set decorations are incongruous—how Mary tends a gorgeous garden or has packed her home with Anthropologie dupes is never explained, nor does it make sense to begin with—though the proximal placement is clear. When the blood starts flowing, Mary Had a Little Lamb is consistently fun. Deaths are no doubt constrained by budget, but there are more practical effects here than audiences might expect. It’s often of the conventional cut to a clear dummy, but all the smashed-in heads render the Lamb a more visceral killer than most of his Mother Goose ilk.
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Still, as a collective package, Mary Had a Little Lamb is a cheap riff on the horror that’s come before, going so far as to blatantly mimic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s entire final reel. It’s a movie that exists to generate interest, maybe a weekend rental, before being quickly forgotten for the next (say, Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2).
Graciously, there’s plenty of gory bedlam and inspired action, even if its mere existence is indicative of one of the genre’s worst modern trends. Everyone is having fun, however, and there’s genuine craftsmanship on display. If Arber wants to return with something original, I’m sure I’ll be there, even if by this stage, these horror-tinged children’s stories risk putting me to sleep more than anything else.
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Mary Had a Little Lamb
Summary
Mary Had a Little Lamb has better intentions than most, but its perfunctory updating of a children’s song still represents the genre’s worst creative impulses.
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