People Want to Hurt My Daughter
Rebecca Mayer (Lori Loughlin - In the Line of Duty: Blaze of Glory) is doing the motherly thing and driving her daughter Conner (Jordan Hinson - Trigger Point) to college, and of course is concerned that not only is she making the right educational choices but that she won't be naive and get in to trouble. But Rebecca is incredibly paranoid and every time she sees some guy chatting to Conner she fears she is going to be snatched. Meanwhile Sheriff Emily Tobin (Kristen Dalton - Christmas on Chestnut Street) has daughter issues of her own as her teenager, Molly (Alix Elizabeth Gitter - Presumed Dead in Paradise), keeps skipping class. But Tobin is also dealing with a reported kidnapping which involves a dangerous psychiatric patient who stole a car from the hospital she escaped from.
This review of "A Mother's Rage" includes major spoilers and as such if you don't want to know any details I suggest just watching this made for TV thriller and either enjoy or laugh at it as you see fit. Now "A Mother's Rage" starts off quite normally as we watch Rebecca taking her daughter to college, but she comes across as over protective and paranoid when it comes to a greasy haired guy who approaches her daughter when they stop at a service station. It seems a little over the top, her level of paranoia, but then maybe Rebecca has reason for being over protective. And then we meet Emily and her daughter Molly who is pretty gifted when it comes to finding information online and so ends up helping her mum.
But when you reach roughly the 25 minute mark, after we have had a moment of car driving action, we learn what is going on. So the big spoiler is that Rebecca is the escaped psychiatric patient, she stole the doctor's car, her daughter was in fact killed a few years earlier and that Rebecca is linked to a series of murders over the years as she sets about killing the sort of low-life who she believes were responsible for her daughter's murder. And so if that doesn't make things clear enough, Conner is not a ghost but Rebecca delussionally seeing her daughter as still alive and her killing spree is protecting her. Yes it does make "A Mother's Rage" over the top but it also makes it entertaining, even when Ted McGinley, yes nice guy Ted McGinley, shows up as a greasy diner cook who threatens Rebecca with a knife. Look there are a lot of flaws in "A Mother's Rage" especially when it comes to teenager Molly assisting her mum solve the case yet it is still surprisingly entertaining.
That out of the box casting of Ted McGinley as a dirty old man is surprising but then we have Lori Loughlin as Rebecca who we watch kill a series of guys she thinks are dangerous to women, pretty out of the normal for the sort of characters Lori Loughlin has played in recent years. As such the casting kind of helps "A Mother's Rage" as whilst logically it seems wrong it ends up entertaining, especially with that element of often being over the top.
What this all boils down to is that "A Mother's Rage" ends up over the top and flawed yet still one seriously entertaining made for TV movie which will make fans of Lifetime movies smile for some of the ideas and casting choices.
