by Jason Adams
Marge Thompson is such a weirdo. Less than ten years after her Oscar nomination for Robert Altman's classic Nashville the singer turned actress Ronee Blakley was playing the Mom in a slasher flick. Some might disparage that turn of events -- say she was "reduced to" playing the Mom in a slasher flick. I am not one of those people. Especially when you see the gloriously strange performance that Blakley turned in. There's nothing unmemorable about the final girl Nancy Thompson's momma -- she'll haunt your dreams!
A Nightmare on Elm Street is about the sins of the parents being visited, rather traumatically, upon their children, a symbiotic theme that Craven would come to visit time and again with his horror films...
Last House on the Left turned its a suburban home and the parental figures therein into revenging butchers raging over their daughter's murder, while Scream has the sexual peccadilloes of some spouse-swapping Moms and Dads snowballing into a teenaged bloodbath. Marge Thompson might've made great friends with Maureen Prescott and the Collingwoods -- they all could've bonded over cocktail weenies with their whispered trespasses.
Marge though... maybe not. Marge is always a beat or two off -- even in Craven's weird suburban enclaves she totters weirdly along her own path. Marge is a one of a kind, especially as Blakley plays her -- her daughter accuses her of self-medicating at one point which is plainly true, as we watch her pull liquor bottles out of the linen closet and from beneath the blankets beside her, to high humorous effect. But Blakley makes Marge more than camp -- she speaks low, soft, as if always existing in a dream herself. Marge never feels of this world, and once her outrageous secrets start spilling out you understand why.
The film speeds towards a showdown where Nancy tells the killer Freddy Krueger he holds no power over her, that he's merely a bad dream she can blink off, but Nancy, for all of her foresight, should've kept her eyes on her Mom. Her mother makes plain from her very first frame, dulled wits about her, that there's no escaping this thin scrim of a home tossed nonchalantly over a bottomless abyss. This all comes to a head in the film's final twist, as Marge beams brightly and Blakley greets the strange sun with near histrionics -- 'They say you've bottomed out when you can't remember the night before," she proudly announces. A smile for the ages as the soundtrack shrieks and the full black tonnage of their poisoned heredity takes fully hold.