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(Popcorn Frights Review) Failure, Family, and Filmmaking in THE MOTHER, THE MENACER, and Me

By. Professor Horror

                                                                                 

 

Every film festival needs a scrappy underdog story, and at this year’s Popcorn Frights, that came in the form of THE MOTHER, THE MENACER, AND ME. Directed with a gonzo DIY spirit, the movie blends horror-comedy, family melodrama, and the aching weight of deferred dreams. On its surface, it’s about Eddie Mathews (James Austin Kerr), a struggling telemarketer who refuses to let go of his Hollywood dream even as his marriage frays, his finances collapse, and his life is swallowed whole by his domineering mother-in-law Nancy (Lorraine Bracco, in scene-stealing form). But underneath the gore, gags, and cult-friendly flourishes, this is a film about the heavy inheritance of failure, and how the people we love, and especially our mothers (biological or otherwise), shape the impossible standards that we chase until they destroy us. It’s bloody, it’s funny, and it’s painfully familiar.

                                           

As a lifelong cheesehead, I wasn’t expecting THE MOTHER, THE MENACER, AND ME to double as a love letter to Wisconsin, but I was pleasantly surprised. Set in Pewaukee, the film has a distinctly regional charm. From off-hand mentions of Culver’s butter burgers and Friday Fish Frys, to a sly shout-out to Milwaukee’s Twisted Dreams film festival, the movie grounds its horror-comedy in a lived-in Midwest specificity. This isn’t just set dressing, but it’s baked into the film’s identity. That grounding in a Wisconsin suburb makes the absurdity feel sharper, the failures sting harder, and the satire cut deeper. For once, Wisconsin isn’t just a punchline in a Hollywood comedy, but it’s a stage for one.

                                                      

At its core, the film is a meditation on failure: the ways it stalks us, defines us, and shapes the decisions we make long before we realize it. For Eddie, failure isn’t just about being stuck in a dead-end job selling presidential bobbleheads. It’s the gnawing fear that if he doesn’t finish Killing Karens, his no-budget horror opus about a masked vigilante who dishes out bloody justice to the world’s most entitled suburban tyrants, then he’ll have proven his mother-in-law right in that he was never cut out to be a filmmaker in the first place. That fear, more than any dream of artistic fulfillment, drives him to pawn his beloved Dracula posters, sell the family van, and even literally bleed for his movie. And it’s here that THE MOTHER, THE MENACER, AND ME strikes a nerve. So many of us grow up with mothers (sometimes our own, sometimes metaphorical ones like teachers, bosses, or in-laws) who press us into perfection with a constant ha-rumph of disapproval. Their voices remind us that quitting is failure, that to stop chasing a goal is weakness, even if that goal no longer brings joy. Eddie doesn’t finish Killing Karens because it fulfills him, but he does it because not finishing would be proof of defeat. In that way, the film becomes a cautionary tale about how success defined by others can hollow you out.

                                                      

Of course, none of this lands without Lorraine Bracco’s blistering turn as Nancy, the mother-in-law from hell. Bracco seems to draw on her time in The Sopranos with echoes of Nancy Marchand’s infamous Livia Soprano as she plays a dream killer and overbearing presence who could snuff out ambition with a glance. Nancy is funny, terrifying, and depressingly real: the kind of person who can cut you down with a look, then act like she was only “joking.” Every scene she’s in vibrates with hostility, and Bracco relishes the opportunity to twist the knife. She embodies not just Eddie’s antagonist, but the crushing, generational voice of doubt that so many artists live with in their heads. However, balancing Bracco’s grounded cruelty is Eddie’s surreal companion, the Menacer: a cloaked, masked figure who is half Batman hype man, half fever-dream manifestation of Eddie’s ambition. Played with manic energy, the Menacer is both a motivator and a menace, egging Eddie on while also threatening to consume him. It’s a clever way of dramatizing the inner dialogue of an artist, especially one obsessed with finishing a project for validation. Is Eddie making his film because he wants to, or because the Menacer (the embodiment of external pressure) won’t let him stop? That tension builds to some of the film’s funniest and most unsettling moments.

                                     

The movie crescendos when fading Hollywood mogul Karen Brazo Fuerte (Leah Remini) takes interest in Killing Karens. Remini plays Brazo Fuerte with a perfect blend of sleaze and seduction, dangling the possibility of real fame if Eddie can just finish one last kill scene. By this point, Eddie has already sacrificed nearly everything (ex: his family’s trust, his best friend Joe’s loyalty, and his own health) to keep the dream alive. The deal feels less like a career opportunity and more like a devil’s bargain. Watching Eddie teeter between triumph and total collapse is both hilarious and gutting, a portrait of the artist as a man cornered by his own ambition.

THE MOTHER, THE MENACER, AND ME is an amusing, blood-splattered ode to the pain and suffering of being an artist. It understands that the scariest part of chasing a dream isn’t failure, but it’s realizing that success might not be worth the price. Anchored by Lorraine Bracco’s venomous performance, James Austin Kerr’s frazzled earnestness, and the surreal presence of the Menacer, the film blends satire with sincerity in such a poignant combination you might actually get tears in your eyes. It’s regional, it’s ridiculous, and it’s relentlessly relatable. At Popcorn Frights, surrounded by a lineup of horror films that leaned into spectacle and scares, THE MOTHER, THE MENACER, AND ME stood out for its humanity. It may be about a masked vigilante dishing out karma to Karens, but its real subject is something scarier: what happens when we let other people’s expectations define our worth. And that, perhaps, is the most horrifying thing of all.