Mother Mortis — Mother Mortis ( DVD)
Mother Mortis is a 2023 low-budget English horror film that attempts to weave together several horror sub-genres- in a decidedly haphazard, not always successful manner. It opens up being focused on a cross-dressing/ marigold glove-wearing serial killer hiding out in an abandoned building. Then, switches to woodland-based slasher meets dark witch horror, before throwing in low-key body horror/ satanic monster elements. Here from SRS Cinema is a region-free DVD- taking in director commentary and a few other things.
Mother Mortis was written and directed by Balraj Kang- being his first-ever feature-length. His other credits take in stills photographer, production assistant, and a few acting credits. So with that in mind, Mother Mortis is certainly a decent opening film from Kang, with some interesting ideas & decent enough gore.
The film runs at one hour and twenty minutes, and to be honest we do have a few pacing issues. We start off for the first fifteen minutes or so with no dialogue- watching a series of people being murdered by Mother Mortis- a man in a tight woman dress, wearing a ragged female mask, and yellow marigold gloves- in an abandoned/graffiti-covered building. This soundtracked by a blend of stark/ moody piano with breakbeats & bombastic electronica. With some neat gore- taking in a lopped-off hand, nipples and genitals ripped off, and some of the better CGI blood splatter effects I’ve seen.
We then shift to the woods where we meet a selection of business folks doing a team-building exercise, and a quirky pair doing an archaeology investigation. And along comes Mother Mortis, a few dressed in black witches, and something turnip-like-come-animated octopus creature in a baby rocker.
The Mother Mortis character is neat enough- though the mythos/explanation behind them is a little confusing. And I think the best way to describe the film, in general, is promising, if somewhat confused.
On the plus side, the gore is not bad neither are the wacky demonic creature effects, we get a decent set of locations as well as an ok shot use, and of course, we get a lot of ideas crammed in, with a good percentage of these hitting home.
On the less positive side- the opening killing/ stalking with no dialogue scene goes on way too long. The plotting is decidedly muddled/ mixed. And some of the early actors are truly awful- though as we go on things do improve with more passable acting.
This region-free DVD features a few extras. First off we get a commentary track with director/ writer Balraj Kang, and this is interesting enough- though he does at points just detail what’s going on the screen. He moves from talking about the reasoning for splitting the film into six chapters, and the way he wanted to use subtly different colour palettes for each. We find out that the early factory setting is an abandoned fish processing building in Hull. He talks about how he and Jay( who plays Mother Mortis) went into the project wanting to give a different twist on the slasher genre. We find out the first dialogue-less part of the film was a stand-alone short- which was sent to around twenty or thirty film festivals. In this part of the film, Jay did the soundtrack, with Balraj remixing it - the rest was scored by Patrik Zumbrunn. Later on, he discusses enjoying working with the actors, he mentions that one of the locations was possibly haunted, and points out some of his favourite shots.
Otherwise, we get two podcast interviews with Balraj- Perfect Turd (11.46), and Slasherville (31.28). There’s a trailer and image gallery.
So, in finishing, Mother Mortis does have a few issues with the pacing, rather scatterbrain genre-blending, and decidedly mixed acting. But there is a lot of promise here, and if you enjoy low-budget horror- it’s worth a punt.