Check out these real bad mothers!

Mother's Day Weekend is here,and while many of us will be treating our moms in style,are we really appreciating the sheer luck of having a good woman to nuture and guide us to adulthood? Perhaps the best way to truly cherish our mothers is by seeing what we could've been given instead. Let's look at some pop culture takes on bad motherhood and count our many blessings:

JOAN CRAWFORD: THE BIGGEST MOTHER OF THEM ALL

Christina Crawford's memoir on her life as Joan Crawford's daughter(and the film version) has become a dysfunctional family classic. Whatever you think of her account,you had to admit that Christina blew the lid off of the Happy Hollywood Home fantasy that many dreamed of. Gee,wouldn't be great if my mother was a movie star? Not if you had to eat raw meat on a daily basis and fear wire hangers! This SNL skit nicely highlights the whole Mommie Dearest madness:



MRS. PETRELLI'S SUPER POWER IS CLEARLY NOT COMPASSION

There are quite a few moms on Heroes but the hands down winner for coldheartedness is Mother Petrelli,who makes no secret in favoring Nathan's political career over everything else,including the fate of her youngest son,Peter. Her calm and collected approach in hiding such things as Claire's true identity and in convincing Nathan into accepting the Linderman plan for destroying NYC in order to take control of the country,certainly gives the Manchurian Candidate's mother a run for her money. Here we see how well she takes the apparent death of Peter and her idea about how to handle it:



NO VEGETABLES, NO DESSERT!

In Psycho,we saw how a boy having his mother as his best friend can lead to trouble. Stephen King one-uped that notion with his written for the big screen only family fear feast,Sleepwalkers,in which Alice Krige needed her darling boy to supply her appetite for the lifeforce of young girls and provide a little romance. Their relationship was not all one sided,as we see here where Alice has to make the nice policeman move out of her way to get to her ailing son and give a little mealtime discipline before leaving:



DON'T MESS WITH HER GREENS!

One of the most memorable characters in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's fractured fairytale musical was The Witch Next Door,(brilliantly first portraited by Bernedette Peters),whose idea of raising a daughter involved locking her in a tower and letting her hair grow long enough to make a ladder. Her twisted devotions and open selfishness makes her a delightfully evil person to watch but one horror of a mother. In this prolouge bit,she tells the tale of how her offspring was bought and sold to her not-so tender clutches:



SERIAL MOM SHINES ALL AROUND THE WORLD

John Waters' take on the celeb status of multiple murderers,Serial Mom, gives you a real good reason to mind your manners. It also gives you a good reason not to complain too much about folks who cause you slight inconviences during the day. Some moms would simply console you if your teacher gives you a bad grade,or your boyfriend is a user but Serial Mom's solution is to maim and massacre. Take a gander at this tribute to a dementedly devoted mother,set to the tune of Barry Manilow's "Daybreak":



See,now don't you feel extra special about the mom you have? Thank your lucky stars that she's not in this gruesome gallery! Happy Mother's Day to all and please share a good laugh together.