This article was produced on behalf of Prezzy Box – However badass your Mum may be, show her you care this year with plenty of Mother’s Day gift ideas to choose from.
With Mother’s Day on the horizon we start to think about all the selfless stuff our Mums do for us and to be thankful. The beauty of a movie Mum, however, is that she can go the extra mile on screen. She may be part of humdrum daily life, but, at the same time, become involved in incredible situations and still manage to protect her offspring against all the odds. This is when she becomes the Badass Mum!
1. Beatrix Kiddo – Kill Bill
Top of the list would have to be Beatrix Kiddo (Uma Thurman) as “The Bride” in “Kill Bill”. After being shot on her wedding day by her jealous ex-lover Bill (David Carradine), who is the father of her unborn child, Beatrix wakes after a four year coma, assumes the baby dead and consequently sets out to wreak revenge on the five people who destroyed her life. These targets were once her fellow members in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad and she is relentless in her search and elimination of every one of them.
In true Tarantino style, the 2 volumes of this amazing film follow Beatrix as she inflicts maximum suffering whilst wielding her samurai, crafted especially by Hatori Hanzo as an instrument of death with which to, quite simply, kill Bill.
Long story short; after much gore, blood, eye-gouging, limb severing, live burial, death by poisonous snake bite and much more (phew)! Beatrix discovers that her daughter BB is alive and after killing Bill using a deadly martial arts move (at last)! Beatrix and her daughter live happily ever after.
2. Sarah Conner – Terminator/Terminator 2
Next on the list is Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in Terminator and Terminator 2 – Judgement Day. She becomes the unwitting target of a cyborg killer – aka the Cyberdyne Systems Series 800 Model 101 Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and is rescued by a time-travelling soldier, Kyle Rees, who informs her that in the future is ridden with highly advanced robots waging war against the humans. The human race will, however, be saved by a man named John Connor and his Resistance movement.
The twist lies in the fact that John Connor is in fact the son of Sarah and Kyle following a brief romantic interlude. The Terminator, in turn, has been sent back into the past to destroy them both in order to ensure that John Connor was never born in the first place, thus ensuring the future dominance of Skynet. Kyle is killed whilst fighting the Terminator and Sarah crushes the cyborg in a hydraulic press, thus leaving the future John fatherless.
In the follow up, ten years later, we see John in a foster home and Sarah in a mental institution after being declared unstable whilst trying to inform the world of the future disaster, and trying to destroy a computer factory. She is now a ferocious and violent warrior with muscles to match and has lived a semi-criminal life whilst trying to teach John the skills he will need to save the world in the future. After several attempts, Sarah escapes from the institution and then encounters the T-1000, a liquid metal cyborg sent from the future to kill John, and a fully refurbished T-800; this time sent to protect her and her son.
John and the Terminator become almost like father and son, and along with Sarah they persuade the researcher behind Skynet to stop his research and destroy all the early Terminators including, sadly, their benevolent partner. Sarah’s transformation from the timid woman in the first instalment, to the ultimate warrior she becomes in the second, saves her son, as well as the future of mankind.
3. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) – Aliens
Whilst in a deep hyper-sleep, drifting through space for 50 years, Ripley awakens only to discover that her daughter has died. She is the sole survivor following a harrowing attack by the Alien in the original movie. Unbeknownst of her daughters’ demise, Ripley sets off to find her and whilst doing so, she encounters the orphaned and traumatised Newt; a little girl with whom she forms a deep bond.
At the same time, Ripley and her new crew have found alien eggs on the same planetoid, LV-426, but are unaware as to who is responsible for them. Ripley learns that her company representative, Carter Burke, is trying to get Alien specimens back to the company lab with the view to using them as a future biological weapon. She accuses Burke of trying to smuggle implanted Alien embryos to Earth inside herself and Newt and killing the rest of the crew during hyper-sleep on the journey back to Earth.
The power goes off, Aliens attack and Newt is captured. Ripley will not leave her behind and rescues Newt and at the same time encounters the Alien queen and her eggs. She destroys the eggs and is then pursued by the mother but makes it to the drop ship and blasts off from the planet just before it blows up. All is well, it appears, but the Alien queen has stowed away and attacks, ripping a fellow crew member in half. Who can forget that enormous head dripping with slime? Ripley grapples with the queen wearing an exosuit cargo-loader and after they fall into an air lock together, Ripley opens the airlock and the queen disappears into space.
The iconic image of Ripley wielding a pulse rifle and a flamethrower in order to protect the child is legendary. What a badass and a kickass mother!
4. Samantha Cain (Geena Davis) – The Long Kiss Goodnight
Samantha Cain, (Geena Davis) is a sweet teacher and single mother with an eight year old daughter, who suddenly discovers that her vague memories are actually real memories of a very different past. She has unexplained scars and discovers talents that she didn’t know she had; such as a gift for deadly accurate knife-throwing which she discovers whilst speed chopping vegetables for supper.
Later in the film, we find her suddenly attacking and killing a deer with her bare hands. All of this sits at odds with her Apple Pie life and after hiring a private investigator –Mitch Hennessy, (Samuel. L. Jackson) she discovers that she was actually called Charly and a trained assassin for a secret government intelligence organisation until she developed amnesia following a severe head injury.
Once her old colleagues realise that old memories are surfacing, a couple of hit-men are sent after her to prevent her remembering too much. Sarah/Charly and Mitch are then forced to go on the run together whilst piecing together her old life. As this continues, she becomes increasingly resourceful and deadly, whilst all the time protecting her beloved child.
5. Diane (Jo Beth Williams) – Poltergeist
Poltergeist sees a typical family living through totally untypical horrors after their little girl, Carol Anne, begins communicating with an entity through their television set following an earthquake.
From then on, strange things start to occur in the household, including furniture moving on its own accord and one of the children, Robbie, being pulled from his bedroom window by the now living tree in the garden. Furthermore, Carol Anne is sucked through a portal into another world and her voice is then heard emanating from the TV.
The only way for the girl to be rescued is for her Mum, with the strength of her maternal love, to pass through into this other dimension and pull her out, which she duly does after being attached to a rope, and then emerging safely with Carol Anne covered in a bucket-load of ectoplasm. Doesn’t really compare with your average Mum’s daily chores does it?
6. Grace Stewart (Nicole Kidman) – The Others
Grace lives with her two children in a rambling and remote old house which has to be kept in darkness as both the children are photo-sensitive due to a rare disease. Strange things begin to happen in the house and Grace soon begins to believe that it is haunted by ghosts. Grace is afraid but takes a shotgun and searches for whatever is responsible for spooky piano playing and strange opening and closing doors. Upon coming across what she thinks is the ghost of an old lady dressed as her daughter, she attacks it violently.
The plot moves on and the family are joined by three strange servants who at one point chase the children at night after the children have found some old hidden headstones. Grace appears, once more with the shotgun, afraid but determined to look after them no matter what.
The twist in the tale (look away now if you have not seen the film) is that in fact they and the servants are all dead and the ghosts in the house are the new inhabitants who are in fact alive! The truth of the matter is that Grace, whose husband was away at war, was driven insane by this and the sombre darkness in the house. She remembers that she smothered the children and then upon realising what she had done, she shot herself. Cheery isn’t it?
Sort of a badass Mum in reverse I guess.
7. Mrs Lily Potter – Harry Potter
One more mention in a list that could no doubt run into hundreds (or at least double figures), is for Mrs Lily Potter, deceased Mum of Harry; he of the wizard variety. We never get to meet Harry’s Mum in the flesh but we are made aware that it is only because of her maternal love that Harry survived the attack by Voldemort that killed both his parents when Harry was just a baby. Harry was left with his trademark lightning shaped scar on his forehead and it later becomes clear that with his mother’s blood running through his veins, Harry will become a saviour against Voldemort’s reign of terror.
A badass Mum of the world of wizardry!
