Critic Reviews

It’s going to confuse, and possibly offend, the suburban mom segment of Lifetime’s audience, and delight the ironic segment. (Hi, Lifetime.) It’s high camp, and whoever at the network green-lit it--assuming, of course, they were in on the joke--is brilliant.

If you strip the remake aspect of this project from your consciousness, it’s actually a pretty watchable film – as lesbian vampire movies go. Mother comes with solid direction from Melanie Aitkenhead and a tight script by Amber Coney.

Director Melanie Aitkenhead manages to weave Franco and Coney's allusions and themes seamlessly, and both the sex scenes and action sequences are executed with a kineticism and style that the dull 1996 version lacked.

The redo--in which Spelling plays the mom of a co-ed who’s fallen for a (gasp!) lesbian (double gasp!) vampire--is still solidly silly and spectacularly cheesy.

This is thin stuff and the only actor I'd definitively say is giving a "performance" is Meade. ... In its last third, the telefilm finally kicks into gear. That's when you get the blood-spurting, face-battering, knock-down-drag-out cemetery brawling vampire action that you want.

Overall Danger is a bit more fun than A Deadly Adoption, but it’s not nearly the subversive deconstruction that Lifetime probably hoped for when they hired Franco in the first place.

It simply plays straight-faced. That works at first, but the narrative is so slack--and the budget so painfully low--that the minimal intrigue becomes impossible to sustain. All aspirations to trash-art aside, it’s ultimately repetitive and dull--padded with even more overhead shots of L.A. roadways than “True Detective” season two.

This new version looks like Franco moved on to something else long before he finished it.

There’s comparatively little tension, action or dialogue in Mother, but there sure is a lot of girl-on-girl writhing.

Moody and bloody, directed ridiculously by Melanie Aitkenhead, it's a reanimated corpse of a movie that nobody needed.