Well Deserved Praise

Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Like everyone else in America and Europe, I know about the tragic Andrea Yates case and how horrible post traumatic psychosis can be from reading about this loving mother who suddenly turned on the people she loved more than anything else in the world: her children. Mrs. Williams aka Mom in "Baby Blues" is the mother of 3 sons, James, Jr. "Jimmy" who is 10, 7-year-old Sammy, and infant Nathan. Cathy, the lone girl is 4 or 5 years old. The Williams family of James, Sr. "Dad", Mom and the 4 children have a normal, everyday life on the farm. Dad is a long haul trucker who leaves his namesake Jimmy in charge of the family when he goes out on business. The children seem to have happy lives, but one day all that changes. Mom starts to hear voices from the family's scarecrow and then everything literally goes to hell on this family as Mom sees her children as bad seeds who must be destroyed. Jimmy is just a little 10-year-old boy who loves his mother, but when she turns on him and kills his siblings, he has to protect himself from her rampage. In the end, Jimmy survives and so does his mother. Dad tells him that the mother was sick and she had post par tum depression that turned her against her children. This is a very good movie about something very few people want to talk about but exists: Post par tum psychosis. The actors are very good, especially Ridge Calipe as the confused, protective Jimmy and Angelina Jolie-lookalike Colleen Porch as the loving mother turned psycho. None of the actors hit a false note in this scary movie!

The nameless mom in this movie has loving children, but four of them, not to mention a trucker husband who is never home, and pressures are getting to her. Still, those who have noticed think it is just stress, that it will pass. Her oldest child, Jimmy, tries to keep his two younger brothers (Sammy and Nathan) and younger sister (Cathy) from fighting and bickering and whining because he has seen mom acting strange, but it's near-impossible, especially since Nathan is a baby and never stops crying, day and night. Mom finds a pack of matches from a strip club in dad's pants pocket, making her go further down the rabbit-hole. She starts hallucinating horrible, gory visions of her children, slaughtered. She cuts herself, puts the blood on her lips like lipstick and starts pretending to be a weather girl in her bathroom mirror. Jimmy sees her crying on the ground outside and tells dad, but dad has some work to do and leaves mom in charge of the secluded family farmhouse. That evening, Jimmy comes across Nathan... now he's on the run with his remaining brother and sister, trapped on a farm with a mother suffering from extreme postpartum psychosis, wielding several sharp tools and hunting her kids like deer. Their only hope is to find Lester, the overweight next-door neighbor (possibly farm-hand?) and get him to call the cops.This movie is thrilling from beginning to end, also very scary to think that it's based on a true story. Postpartum psychosis is when a mother goes insane and gets severely depressed after giving birth to a child or raising a large family. I had seen the episode of Cold Case titled 'Baby Blues', in which a businesswoman kills her own newborn daughter, so this movie seemed like it could shed more light on the subject. Of course it is a dramatized movie, but postpartum psychosis, also cabin fever (secluded farm and never leaving) and religious mania are disorders and obsessions that happen every day, to completely ordinary people.The acting was great, especially from the kids. The mom had an uncanny resemblance to Margaret White, the religious nutter in the 1976 film Carrie. To make things even creepier, mom manipulates and sweet-talks the children but quickly turns on them as she hunts for them, acting very sadistic. She stabs her daughter with a pitchfork, drowns baby Nathan and says she is going to 'spank' Sammy, instead repeatedly stabbing him in the butt with a pair of scissors until blood covers her face. Their was a brief moment of comedy, when Lester is secretly smoking dope at home and has bluegrass music playing too high to hear anyone scream (what an oblivious idiot)! I've seen the actress of mom once before, it's amazing how she can become from average to a merciless child killer for a movie.One thing rather unrealistic was the idea that mom was being released from the mental hospital after brutally murdering three of her kids and Lester, along with several animals. Aside from that, Baby Blues is an eerie and disturbing movie that shows how far things can go before it is too late.

A long haul trucker hits the road just as his wife is in the throes of a psychotic break due to postpartum depression. Now left alone with their mother, the oldest son must attempt to protect his three siblings and escape their isolated farmhouse.What a discovery! It's hard to believe that I hadn't heard of Baby Blues before renting it on a whim last October. This is a disturbing film with some intense imagery. The first 30 minutes are especially rattling, as we are treated to an all too realistic portrait of a mental breakdown. One particularly effective scene sees the mother sitting in a daze as she imagines heinous sounds emanating from the baby monitor in place of her baby's actual crying. The film eventually turns more towards a slasher type scenario, only with kids as the victims instead of the typical teenagers. Not to say that it gets less disturbing, it actually doesn't. The kills get under your skin, especially the first one we're witness to involving the sharp point of a mirror.Colleen Porch is fantastic as the mother, never taking things over the top, something that easily could have happened. The kids are good too, all perfectly believable as normal children in a terrible situation that they don't fully understand. There's a scene where the mother attempts to drown her daughter in the bathtub, the whole thing made more effective by the reaction of the girl's brother in the background, a reaction that rang very true to me.This isn't a film for everyone. It is often hard to watch due to the unnerving nature of what unfolds on the screen. For others like myself who prefer to feel something when watching a horror film, this is one that you won't want to miss. It's exceptionally well done.

A young mother (an excellent and terrifying performance by Colleen Porch) suffering from post-partum depression goes dangerously crazy and turns on her own children. It's up to ten-year-old Jimmy (a sound and credible portrayal by Ridge Canipe) to protect both himself and his younger siblings from their mother's murderous wrath. Directors Amardeep Kaleka and Lars Jacobson (the latter also wrote the dark and uncompromising script) don't pull any punches in their telling of this genuinely scary and upsetting tale that was inspired by an actual incident; the extreme scenes of brutal violence against children (some of them are even killed!) are intensely painful, gut-wrenching, and hard to watch. Moreover, the meticulous and convincing evocation of pedestrian everyday reality adds an extra frightening plausibility to the already bleak and unnerving narrative. The best and most distressful horror films hit home (in this case literally) by showing how ordinary life can be ripped asunder by an equally mundane, yet deadly and unusual phenomenon. One becomes very afraid of what this unhinged and dangerous woman might do to both herself and her own children; her descent into psychotic insanity is the stuff of real nightmares. The film further benefits from sterling acting by an able no-name cast: Porch and Canipe are remarkable in the leads, with fine support from Joel Bryant as the trucker father, Kali Majors and Holden Thomas Maynard as Jimmy's younger siblings, and Gene Witham as amiable neighbor Lester. Matthew MacCarthy's cinematography gives the picture an appropriately rough and grainy look. Amardeep Kaleka's shuddery score also does the shivery trick. The conclusion is positively bone-chilling. Unpleasant for sure, but still quite powerful and effective just the same.