Jaime King has signed on to star in Mother’s Day, Darren Lynn Bousman’s remake of the 1980 Troma slasher pic.
King, an actress whose career has never quite taken off despite appearances in movies like Sin City and possibly because of appearances in movies like The Spirit, will play a wife who has lost her child, and has shut herself away from her husband to grieve. That process is rather rudely interrupted by a psychotic family who return to King’s house, where they once lived, and begin torturing and killing the inhabitants.
Now we don’t know about you, but in horror movie country, that means it’s time for King’s character to stop snivellin’ and start kickin’ some butt. It is Mother’s Day, after all…
That’s already a fairly substantial plot rejig from the original Mother’s Day, a schlocky piece of Troma nonsense about campers who fall foul of psycho brothers who live only to please their demented mother. The Charles Kaufman-directed movie was praised by Eli Roth when he was promoting Hostel Part II, but for the most part it’s not that good. Even for a remake directed by Bousman, the man who gave us Repo! The Genetic Opera, it would seem that the only way is up.
King isn’t the only actor to sign on today, either. X-Men’s Shawn Ashmore, Briana Evigan, Alexa Vega and Matt O’Leary all climbed aboard, with O’Leary set to play one of the killers, alongside the already cast Deborah Ann Woll.
"What we're trying to do is elevate this outside of a genre movie," Bousman told The Hollywood Reporter, convincing absolutely nobody in the process. "I've done three Saw films, I've done Repo, and yes, this is horrific at times, but it's much darker and deeper because of the focus on the characters."
Scott Milam wrote the script for the remake, and filming is set to begin next month in Winnipeg, with a release timed for next Spring. Round about Mother’s Day, in fact.