It’s been a minute since I’ve written anything. Please pardon my absence, I was dealing with family issues that zapped my creativity and prevented me from putting my thoughts to the page. Happily, I received an unexpected burst of inspiration from a recent entry in the ‘make every fairy tale a gritty slasher’ horror subgenre with Mary Had A Little Lamb, a movie that I obviously wasn’t expecting to be good. But this movie isn’t just bad, it’s bafflingly bad, a type of bad that makes me question why they made it and what they hoped to achieve. I know you probably have never seen this and will never see this, so please, let me work through my thoughts on Mary Had A Little Lamb for my own sake.

Our film starts with two people held captive by Mary and her…Little Lamb, a large man-ish person wearing a sheep mask that could look frightening in the right lighting, but that lighting is never found here. Anyway, these two captives are wounded and frightened and quickly dispatched by Little Lamb because we only have 80 minutes to get through this so we need to speed things up! Cut to a woman recording what I thought was a podcast, but turns out to be a radio true crime broadcast, a category of radio show that I don’t think does or can exist. Seriously, aren’t true crime shows kind of graphic by necessity? How on Earth could you get that on the radio, even as an independent show? Would you even be allowed to describe cases beyond saying ‘a crime was committed’? Also, the idea of someone sub-30 years old making a radio show in the year of our Lord 2023 is hysterical.

The situation gets even goofier as the camera pans out from a close-up to reveal that this broadcast is not being recorded in a recording booth, but in a clearly repurposed living room complete with the broadcaster’s personal assistants sitting next to her, and her social media expert sloppily making out with a random man on the nearby couch. I’m not joking, this guy is, in universe, a random dude the social media lady thought was hot. Turns out this extremely professional setup is in trouble, as no one wants to listen to a true crime radio broadcast about cold cases, so Carly (the broadcaster) convinces the radio boss to send her out on a recent disappearance investigation thing, which is absolutely in no way related to the opening of the movie. For serial.

Naturally, this leads our group of heroes, and one random horny dude, to the site of all the disappearances, which just so happens to be the bread and butter of the no-budget movie, the woods! Now that everyone is in the woods they have only one option – getting instantly and hopelessly lost, like, Blair Witch camera on one eyeball “I am so scared” lost. What other option do they have but to stumble upon a creepy dilapidated old house in the middle of nowhere and seek refuge with the creepy old lady who we know is a murderer? I will give this movie one thing though, there’s a kind of interesting concept that gets brought up when Carly decides that she is going to frame the woman and her son for being behind the disappearances in order to create a story. Something that would have a bit more impact if we didn’t know they absolutely are responsible for all the murders.

The reason I went so in-depth with the story up until this point is so I can highlight the exact moment that the mask comes off and Mary Had A Little Lamb turns into a shameless Texas Chainsaw Massacre ripoff. I don’t mean ripoff in the way that all slasher movies are essentially Texas Chainsaw Massacre ripoffs, I mean that this becomes a beat-for-beat and later a nearly shot-for-shot remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The beginning is subtle enough, it starts with a group of city folk drawn to the middle of nowhere by the ghoulish crimes of the poverty-stricken rural dwellers, but then they come face to face with the deranged mentally challenged child of a manipulative monster who uses this child to commit murders and things get a bit more on the nose. Then Little Lamb uses a chainsaw for exactly one scene and any pretense of originality is out the window.  From that point on, this is a scene-for-scene recreation of the captive dinner scene, the escape, and the hitching of a ride in a pickup truck, complete with Little Lamb doing an axe dance, which is a huge downgrade from the chainsaw dance. Below is a screenshot from the finale. A finale that probably was a lot clearer shot in daytime. With a cinematographer.

This moment is all I’ve been able to think about since watching it, because I’ve wondered, more than anything else, why? Making movies is hard. Writing movies is hard. If you’ve made half an original movie, why have the second half be a straight copy of one of the most well-known horror movies ever made and completely invalidate any effort that you’ve put into making the first half? I’m trying not to be cynical but I have to wonder if they assumed no one would still be watching by the 40-minute mark and that the first act was all they needed to sell this to some distributor eager to cash in on the Blood and Honey trend. Or maybe they ran out of time, maybe the writer was pulling his hair out at 3 A.M. with a 7 A.M. deadline, coffee in one hand and cigarette in the other, trying to figure out how this horror movie based on a nursery rhyme would end. Then his eyes glanced over at his DVDs and settled on Texas Chainsaw Massacre. “No one will notice…” he thought while filing the serial numbers off to save his job. Less likely, but that scenario is way funnier.

I’m done racking my brain on this topic. Ripoff finale aside there isn’t much to talk about with this, it has the levels of acting, set design, and cinematography you’d expect from a movie with this title. I was entertained, but that’s probably because I have mental problems, and watching this stuff is much cheaper than therapy. Apart from a bizarre story thread involving sexual assault, I enjoyed this in exactly the way I thought I would, and that counts for something. Thanks for letting me spill my brain on the floor in front of you, and thanks for sticking with me. I’m planning to write about some new movies soon!