“Running With Scissors” opens this week, the true story of writer Augusten Burroughs’ youth, a damaged childhood spent in the creepy care of his mentally ill mother and her equally deranged psychiatrist. Annette Bening plays Burroughs’ still-living mother (a woman with whom he has limited to no contact, according to recent interviews) as though Bening’s character in “American Beauty” was June Cleaver by comparison. Bad for Burroughs, yes, but big fun for a Friday night at the movies.
Now, in real life you’d spend your adult years in therapy trying to get over the damage that kind of mother would do to you, but psychotic, neglectful, cold, inept, drugged-up moms at the multiplex are never not fun to watch, somewhere between a screen full of adorable Dalmatian puppies and that guy from “Saw” who invents death-machines. And unlike your actual crazy mom, you can enjoy them and then leave them behind at the theater. Okay, you could abandon your actual crazy mom too, but she’d probably find her way back to you. And you’d never hear the end of it.
I have some favorites...
1. Helen Mirren in ‘The Queen’This one’s in theaters right now, starring Mirren has HRH Queen Elizabeth II. She’s wrapped in swaddling tweed and jutting in her jaw to make that coolest of all female film accessories, the almost-never-seen double chin. It’s both a bold leap off the ledge of vanity and a comically, warmly sympathetic portrayal of one of the stiffest, least demonstrative mothers of the last century. The real HRH should invite Mirren to dinner at the Palace to thank her for the good PR.
2. Ursula Reit and Dodo Denney in ‘Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory’Reit, as Mrs. Gloop, the obese mother of chocolate river freestyler Augustus; and Denney as Mrs. TeeVee, the know-it-all loudmouth chaperone of obnoxious tube-obsessive Mike TeeVee, are the kind of passive moms you see in the mall with evil brats running roughshod around them. And though your first impulse is to wish for the clock to turn back and public spankings to be socially acceptable again, your next, more rational, thought is to call Child Protective Services and save these kids from the person who gave birth to them.
3. Angela Lansbury in ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ and Leopoldine Konstantin in ‘Notorious’Controlling doesn’t begin to describe these women. In Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious,” Konstantin is as dictatorial as the deceased Fuhrer to whom her son Claude Rains pledges his allegiance (and she’s probably why he’s a Nazi, too). And as mother to Laurence Harvey in “Manchurian Candidate,” Lansbury is as purely evil as any character in modern film history, mind-manipulating her son to be a pawn in world-shaking tragedy. She’s like the Horse Whisperer of the Apocalypse.
4. Mary Tyler Moore in ‘Ordinary People’Wouldn’t it be great to have a mom who makes you French toast — your favorite! — every morning and who buys you expensive preppy sweaters and makes sure the house is spotlessly clean at all times and keeps track of your comings and goings and pressures you to clean out your bedroom closet “because it really is a mess” and won’t even let you hold on to a camera to take a holiday snapshot because you might do it wrong and then everything, EVERYTHING, will be ruined and then, oops, you try to kill yourself and really bloodify the grout in the master bathroom. After that she’s like, “And you are….?”
5. Amy Poehler in ‘Mean Girls’
When I was in high school there was a Cool Mom in town and she let all the kids drink at her house because she wanted them to do it where she could watch them. Of course her kids all drove drunk anyway. But it was the early ’80s and you could still get away with that sort of thing. Nowadays the other parents would have her arrested. You keep waiting for that to happen to Amy Poehler’s character, the vicariously popular mother to Rachel McAdams’ “selfish, backstabbing, slut-faced ho-bag” high school Queen Bee. It never does.
6. Edith Bouvier Beale in ‘Grey Gardens’“Grey Gardens” is the modern-classic documentary about the round-the-bend relatives of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, and its eye-popping, jaw-dropping qualities hold up shockingly well even 30 years after it was made. Affectionate but aghast, the cameras record every bickering, demented moment between the elderly Beale and her sweater-as-a-hat-wearing daughter. You’ll give your own mom two Mother’s Day gifts after watching it.
7. Anthony Perkins in ‘Psycho’ and Betsy Palmer in ‘Friday The 13th’How strong a memory do you want to leave after you depart? Here you have one mom whose influence was so strong that her own son becomes her after she dies and kills everyone he can get close enough to stab in really bad Granny drag, and then another mother so consumed with grief after her soon-to-be-zombified son drowns that she goes and murders Kevin Bacon (among others) in a less-than-ladylike revenge. Perkins doesn't die for his sins (though he probably wishes he had to save himself from the sequels) but Palmer does, winning the gross-out sweepstakes after earning a really wacky decapitation.
8. Bambi’s Mother in ‘Bambi’She knew it was hunting season and she took her kid out anyway.
9. Oprah Winfrey in ‘Beloved’Winfrey’s final film (she says) saw her starring as a freed slave with, for lack of a better word, issues after having killed one of her own children to save them from a life of bondage. Okay, so murdering your child, if it’s a “Sophie’s Choice”-level situation, is, you know, not really your fault. I get that. But then you make your other not-murdered kids crazy by failing to shield them from ghosts that haunt your house, and you cause the reincarnated spirit of the one you killed to be even more loony than she appeared to be when she emerged from a nearby swamp to complicate your life. That’s nutty parenting.
10. Faye Dunaway in ‘Mommie Dearest’The grandest meanest mother of them all. This is the one everyone knows, the one everyone can quote to point of overuse — even if they’re not gay men — the one everyone’s still scared of, and the one more than a few people still respect. Joan Crawford may have been the ultimate monster, but as Faye Dunaway played her (in what I think of as an audacious performance that will be seen as something more than camp someday) it’s like she was just a visiting alien mom from a faraway planet, one where they simply do things differently. Like getting “mad at the dirt” for being dirty. Aliens have all these other rules, you know?
Dave White is the film critic for Movies.com and the author of “Exile in Guyville.” Find him at .