Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

kosmasp What started off as a short, became a feature length movie. And Guillermo Del Toro was the one who saw the potential in the movie. In both movies so to speak. The general idea is simple and yet very horrifying. Having two children in peril will work most of the time. Shooting this like it is one take (great effects doing that and the other things in the movie) was genius too.Of course there are more takes, it's very complicated, but also very short and you get the feeling of dread and fear. Saying more about it, would spoil the "fun" you could have watching it. The good thing is, it doesn't matter if you watch this before watching the feature length movie or afterwards. The movie itself is kind of absorbed as one scene in the movie ... though it has a small difference ...

TxMike I saw this film short as an "extra" on the DVD for the feature length movie of the same name, by the same writers. The extra, with Del Toro's introductory comments, is about 5 minutes. The short film itself is right at 3 minutes.It's really only an idea, actually. We see two small girls in a large, two-story house. The atmosphere is spooky. Then we see the ghost figure "Mama" rushing towards the girls as they run up the stairs to safety. Hopefully.Del Toro came across this short and was impressed enough to contact the writers, a brother and sister team, to see if they might write a feature length film on the same theme.And they did, the 1 hour 40 minute horror movie "Mama." Which I enjoyed, BTW, even though it is not a genre that I am usually drawn to.

gavin6942 Little Victoria (Berta Ros) is waken up by her sister Lili (Victoria Harris) who insists on leaving the house because somebody unpleasant has come back.Although I watched this through the tainted point of view of seeing the feature film first, I think I can judge and review it objectively. (At least I hope so.) In this very short film, we have two little girls scared by an unknown entity. We do get to see this "Mama" a bit, and she is indeed something to fear. I actually think the effects look far better here than they do in the full-length version.This excels as a short film because it leaves us wondering: who are these girls, what is this Mama, and where are the parents? And despite leaving us with questions, it is very self-contained. The lack of plot is actually more effective than having a plot.

Michael_Elliott Mama (2008) *** (out of 4) Andres Muschietti's three-minute short is what helped get his 2013 film made. Fans of that film (whick I'm one of) will certainly want to watch this just to compare how the sequence here looked in the feature. What we basically have is two little girls walking around their house when they notice mama and try to get away from her. This scene was actually redone in the feature to a very good effect and considering this thing just lasts three-minutes there's really no reason to try and treat it the same as a feature. With that said, I was actually quite impressed with this short as the director at least managed to build up some tension and the pay-off was nice. I will also admit that I actually liked mama from this short better than the feature, which was good but often times relied on too much CGI. Both Victoria Harris and Berta Ros are good as the children.