“The Family That slays Together Stays Together”
Roger Corman’s Bloody Mama (1970) is a grand guignol take on Bonnie and Clyde-era bandits, riffing to bluegrass, and revelling in its grotesque and petty sadistic acts. In this it falls a good way short of the highs (or lows) of Robert Aldrich’s Grissom Gang (1971), but not many films start with an incestuous gang rape of a child. . . There again not many novelizations up the ante on such a start, but Robert Thom’s recasting of his own screenplay more than raises the table stakes. Here's the book's opening sentences:
“Kate, soon to be Kate Barker, or Ma Barker, was not beautiful, but men seldom realised it while actually making love to her, or, to be more precise, while penetrating and/or being contained (or reorganized, re-established, extended, drawn, preposterously, into god-like dimensions) by one of Kate’s three, taut, quite unusually lubricious, and, most of the time, phenomenonally responsive (and/or reflexive), infinitely pneumatic orifices. THREE: For eating, for pissing, for relieving her bowels. Kate was a natural!”
In the movie, Bruce Dern’s character makes one of Ma Baker’s boys, Freddie, his jail house punk. Beyond the promise of a beating -- “I’m not gonna hurt you . . . I really like you” -- the scene doesn’t amount to much, but in the novelisation Freddie slips into a reverie, and has a punk’s pulp dream :
Freddie had always had a waking dream: He was The Lone Ranger. He had a treasure map tattooed on his chest. The bad men wanted to cut it off his chest: a thin layer of skin and flesh, the minimum of blood. The bad men wanted the map only, not his life, and the bad men had drugged him. He was deep in a cave. The bad men had almost begun the operation. Tonto was on the way. Tonto might rescue him. The man on the floor, gazing up at him, looked like Tonto, Freddie’s Tonto.
Ma Barker: “Lloyd when you’re working on those model aeroplanes you get to acting awful silly.”
“Now I wanna sniff some glue, now I wanna have something to do.”
-- The Ramones