Mary Had a Little Lamb review.
The era of slasher movies based on children’s nursery rhymes begins with an expected shrug.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Mary Had a Little Lamb
Directed by Jason Arber
Written by Harry Boxley
Starring Danielle Scott, May Kelly, Harry Boxley, Lila Lasso, Mark Sears, Gillan Broderick, Gaston Alexander and Christine Ann Nyland
Mary Had a Little Lamb Review
The buzz and financial success of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey meant we were going to see an influx of children’s stories and characters reappropriated as horror movies. We’ll get a sequel to Blood and Honey and a Cinderella take that is supposed to drop any day now. It doesn’t stop at reimagining Disney classics as modern horror tales…two of this year’s spooky season offerings take things a step further and use nursery rhymes as their jumping off point. Three Blind Mice will be out later this month…but first…Mary Had a Little Lamb has been unleashed onto the world.
So, let’s reverse engineer this one. You need a person named Mary (Christine Ann Nyland). Check. Here, Mary takes the form of an isolated old woman. She must, of course, have a little lamb. Well…she has a giant son with a lamb head (Gaston Alexander). Not so little…but close enough. Now…the song itself is all about a lamb following a little girl to school…so this is where the film really diverges from the source material. This lamb murders everyone it comes across. So…not a direct adaptation.
In lieu of a film where an adorable lamb makes a bunch of school kids happy…Mary Had a Little Lamb is an old school slasher movie. It has more in common with Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre than it does the children’s song. Actually…I should say it has more in common with any of the Chain Saw sequels/remakes. Like them, Mary Had a Little Lamb isn’t very good. Sadly, I think it is better than some of them…but that says more about that franchise than this movie.
Like Hooper’s masterpiece…Mary Had a Little Lamb shows terrible things happening to a group of people who go where they shouldn’t. Since this is 2023…those people are true crime investigators. For narrative purposes they aren’t podcasters for a change. They have a live over the air radio show that covers cold cases. The cases prove to be too cold for the station manager who demands a fresh story, or they’ll lose their time slot. Luckily for them people have been going missing in Warp Woods. Unluckily for them…they find out why.
Carla (May Kelly) is the host of Carla’s Cold Cases…and our lead character. She’s a bit of a problematic one. Wanting to keep her radio show on the air causes some unlikable character moments. When they discover Mary and her isolated house…Carla wants to tie her and her yet unseen son to the missing people. Now…she’s right…so the story probably wants you to let her off the hook for the idea. But she doesn’t know she’s right. She is happy to ruin these people’s lives to further her career. Carla’s team of victims in waiting disagreed with her idea completely. It’s an odd choice for a character we are meant to root for.
Mary Had a Little Lamb is one of those old school slasher movies where a bunch of characters are introduced, and you know they’re not going to make it. If you were to pick one character who may make it out of the woods…you’ll pick it correctly. It’s unfortunate since the story allows for a nice switch of the formula in the climax…and then chooses the obvious instead. It’s also not a movie that intends to scare you at any point. Or…if it is…it fails completely at it.
What it offers is swift and brutal deaths to almost everyone who comes across Mary’s son. There are some decent practical effects…mostly in the aftermath of carnage. A strong opening scene/first kill sets a bar that the rest of the movie never really clears. The truth is that Mary Had a Little Lamb is probably exactly what you expect it to be from the title. There’s no attempt at innovation here…outside of a thought presented about the origin of the monster…there’s not much interesting in the story either.
What there is, however, is a big guy with a giant lamb head who kills a bunch of people. The movie takes too long to get going. After the fun opening scene…it takes half the movie for anything to really happen. The cast ranges from find to…not so fine…but the acting is decent overall given the obvious quickness of the shoot. The obvious movie to compare it too is the Winnie-the-Pooh release earlier this year. It’s around the same level. The acting is probably better here…but it isn’t as fun. Both are completely unnecessary, of course. Neither does anything with the property to comment on anything. Which remains the biggest miss of these children’s stories turned slasher movies.
Scare Value
Mary Had a Little Lamb isn’t as fun as it should be. It’s an easy watch that revels in its old school slasher motif. Look…if you are the kind of person who wants to watch a guy with a giant lamb head killing under-developed characters…you’ll get what you want here. If you aren’t that kind of person…nothing here is going to change your mind.
2/5
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