Before Curry Barker became a substantial deal at the box office earlier this year with Monkey's Paw chiller Obsession, the 27-year-old Alabaman filmm
Before Curry Barker became a substantial deal at the box office earlier this year with Monkey’s Paw chiller Obsession, the 27-year-old Alabaman filmmaker cut his genre teeth making scary compact films alongside buddy Cooper Tomlinson on their shared YouTube channel ‘that’s a bad idea’. Now, in a surprise collaboration with tech giant Windows, Barker has returned to his elderly genre stomping ground with a chilling novel compact, ‘Mama Bear’, led by Jon Lee Richardson — a very good idea in our book. And you can check it out below;
Hoo boy! Curry Barker really is the master of “there’s something/someone creepy in the corner of the frame” filmmaking, isn’t he? Now, far be it from us to offer the grand unifying theory on what the heck we just witnessed, but Barker’s clearly returning to the seriously effed-up supernatural shenanigans well here, putting house cleaner Floyd (Richardson) through the wringer as just another day on the job turns into a waking nightmare as a screaming phone-call, a loaded gun, and a shadowy doppelgänger all converge upon the penniless sod. While some had speculated that the title may have been a reference somehow to Obsession‘s main character, it seems fairly apparent that it actually refers to Katie Sarife’s gun-toting Lacey, who finds herself experiencing an all-timer crash out (and a catastrophic case of seemingly mistaken identity.) Whatever exactly is afoot, ‘Mama Bear’ comes bearing all the lugubriously lit, enigmatically symbolic, ultraviolent hallmarks of a classic Curry Barker frightener.
While ‘Mama Bear’ is a nice pre-Halloween trick and treat, it is alas only a five-minute compact. Thankfully however, we don’t have ages to wait for Barker’s next film(s). Faux paranormal investigators joint Anything But Ghosts is spiriting into cinemas on May 7, 2027, while another as-yet-untitled feature horror project is already in the works at Universal and Blumhouse Atomic Monster. While we wait for those, we’re off to fill our trick-or-treat baskets with some lovely, furry cat sandwiches. Yum!
