Big Bad Mama

Get ready to rumble as a beautiful young widow breaks up her teen daughter's wedding and hits the road on an outlaw voyage to Waco, Texas. Making pit stops for armed robbery and a mother/daughter striptease, Angie Dickinson 's Big Bad Mama teaches her girls the real facts of life. Format: Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC. Language: English (Dolby Digital 2.0). Region: All Regions. Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1. Number of discs: 1. Rated: R (Restricted). Studio: New Concorde. DVD Release Date: February 23, 1999. Run Time: 83 minutes.

Angie Dickinson stars as a bank-robbing matriarch in this 1974 Roger Corman production, often described as a knock-off of Bonnie and Clyde. (As if that makes any difference regarding the worth of the film--which is pretty good.) Set in Great Depression-era Texas, the story finds Dickinson's desirable and poor character driven to crime, along with her two daughters (Susan Sennett, Robbie Lee), all of whom use sex to distract or drive men into culpability. The film, directed by Steve Carver, is pure Corman formula: fast-moving, violent, gritty, adorned with nudity, and yet solidly true to its own sense of high drama and texture. Veteran Angie Dickinson brings solid acting chops (and a great bod on display) to the enterprise--and speaking of Enterprise, William Shatner is quite memorable (as is Tom Skerritt) as one of the gentlemen who fall under the antiheroine's sway. --Tom Keogh