As the direct sequel to his 1995 Mommy movie, Max Allan Collins’ Mommy’s Day is the superior effort on every level. This achievement is reached despite its love-to-hate lead meta-quipping, “Don’t you know the sequel is never as good as the original?” Then again, this is uttered one moment before pushing a character’s head through a plugged-in computer monitor, so perhaps she didn’t mean it.

Yes, Patty McCormack is back and The Bad Seedier than ever as murderous matriarch Mrs. Sterling — still preppy, still malicious and still xenophobic! She’s an hour away from getting the needle in death row when she’s selected to be a guinea pig for a “revolutionary antipsychotic drug” implanted within the arm, making her — in her own words — “new and improved, like a laundry detergent.” Although sprung from the pokey and into an experimental halfway house, Mommy is banned from seeing her beloved teen daughter, Jessica Ann (Rachel Lemieux, who only acted again in Collins’ next and best film, Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market), now in braces and deep in training for an ice-skating competition.

Oh, and homicides soon happen.

Pulp-fic legend Mickey Spillane and scream queen Brinke Stevens reprise their supporting roles, alongside comedy improv legend Del Close and WKRP in Cincinnati program director Gary Sandy, respectively joining this second go-round as the warden and a nose-pokin’ police sergeant. Jessica Ann cedes the spotlight as Collins makes Mommy the focus. Perhaps with her coronation to front and center, McCormack dials the hysteria up one notch, and is more fun to watch as a result.

Apparently, her spirit was infectious; Collins seems more engaged with the material this time around. In particular, he adds a subplot as Mrs. Sterling appears on a daytime talk show, allowing him to satirize (if only mildly) the “trash TV” format popular at the time, à la Ricki Lake, Jenny Jones, Jerry Springer, Maury Povich and their collective ambush techniques. Shot on higher-definition video, Mommy’s Day boasts a sharper picture throughout and a well-earned twist in the third act. With a meatier mélange of kill scenes than its predecessor, Mommy’s Day is often mischaracterized as a slasher film, but it remains a thrifty thriller — albeit one with a shower-set murder via ghetto blaster — from the good ol’ days when America made it a Blockbuster night. —Rod Lott

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Although Mommy isn’t officially a sequel to 1956’s classic The Bad Seed, the idea for the shot-on-video thriller sparked from a “what if?” scenario in writer/director Max Allan Collins’ mind — namely, what would Patty McCormack’s killer-kid character be like as a grown-up … y’know, if she hadn’t been fatally fried by a bolt of lightning and all? Mommy knows best. Call it The Bad Seed: The Cougar Years.

McCormack’s titular matriarch, Mrs. Sterling, is a 40-something, double-“widowed” single woman dripping in pearls, entitlement and racism. She enters the Iowa-lensed movie like a boss, strutting into school after final bell to have a word with the teacher (Majel Barrett, 1973’s Westworld) who has decided to give this year’s outstanding student award to someone other than her daughter, Jessica Ann (newcomer Rachel Lemieux). Only one woman leaves the conversation alive, thus making Mrs. Sterling the ultimate stage mother.

As the body count increases, 12-year-old Jessica Ann’s distrust in her mom grows, boosted by the elder’s ability to open jars with minimal effort. When the girl goes snooping in Mommy’s bedroom, Collins cooks up genuine suspense, with viewers nervously looking at the open door in the far right of frame, for any sign Jessica Ann is about to get busted.

A prolific novelist — and a damned good one — Collins based Mommy on his same-named short story from the 1995 horror anthology Fear Itself. On the page, you can write anything, but on the screen, everything comes with a price tag; this being Collins’ first feature, his ambition sometimes gets reality-checked. Nowhere is this more evident than the night scenes, lit with saturated red, blue and orange gels … that get washed out on video (but are more visually pleasing than the credits’ use of Comic Sans and other egregious fonts). Collins acknowledges this limitation on the 25th-anniversary “widescream” Blu-ray set (which also contains the 1997 sequel, Mommy’s Day). By his third movie, Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market, he expertly had reversed the equation to make minuscule resources work in the flick’s favor.

Luckily, McCormack’s performance doesn’t depend upon a line item. She’s clearly having a ball. As much of a hoot she is to watch, not everyone else aligns to her frequency of camp. Having no acting experience at the time, Lemieux isn’t up to that challenge as Mommy’s distrustful daughter, but she does a decent job in what is the true lead. Famous faces also in the cast include The Exorcist’s Jason Miller, Mike Hammer creator Mickey Spillane and B-movie scream queen Brinke Stevens (The Jigsaw Murders), here completely clothed. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.