October 3, 2018
Written by: Brian Taylor
Starring: Nicholas Cage, Selma Blair, Anne Winters
Budget: $4,000,000
Quote: "Your motherfucking mother said to open this door! And motherfuckers, you're going to open this motherfucking door!"
Trivia: Nicolas Cage said this was his favorite movie in ten years that he had filmed.
2018 really has been a great year for horror movies! Mandy, Summer of '84 and the excitement around the upcoming Halloween are all reasons to celebrate this year. And Mom and Dad is yet another great and unforgettable horror movie. Writer/director Brian Taylor cut his teeth writing and directing the Crank movies, which were action flicks with a premise that the main character's heart rate needs to stay elevated or he will die, which forces himself to engage in intense situations (drugs, suffocating, electrocution) in order to survive. It is with this intensity in mind that Taylor wrote/directed Mom and Dad, an extremely dark comedy about adulthood and the darkness of suburbia. The basic premise is that inexplicably a mass hysteria causes parents to kill their children. Upping the ante, the film also stars Nicholas Cage who always brings an extra level of craziness with him in his acting. The movie is violent, bloody, at times funny, with an interesting look at the parts of us we do not want to recognize.
Mom and Dad focuses on an ordinary family of four. There is dad (Nicholas Cage), mom (Selma Blair), their teenage daughter (Anne Winters) and their ten year old son (Zackary Arthur). The daughter is an angsty and sarcastic teenager who is rude to her parents, spends most of her time staring at her phone, and just wants to hang out with her boyfriend. The mom is a bored housewife who is stuck in her routine of trying to stay young and depressed about what her life has become. The father is in the midst of a midlife crisis (he bought a gun, covets his speedster car, and tries to build a man-cave), constantly looking back at who he was as a young man and the potential lost. Both parents subconsciously blame their children for their unhappiness: the mother blames them for not fulfilling the mother expectations she had growing up and the father blames them for forcing him to abandon what an amazing person he could have been. Neither of these issues are the kids fault and if the parents really looked hard at themselves they would probably see that they had unrealistic expectations and were not as amazing as they imagined they were. But that is neither here nor there.
Before everything go crazy, we get a brief snapshot of suburbia. The mother's friends in the exercise class complains about how her daughter has been stealing from her and that she takes solace in the jealous idea that one day her daughter's body will get old too. Bored, the mother unsuccessfully tries to initiate an affair with a old friend. The teenagers sit in class bored and apathetic, more interested in vaping and social media. The father works at a job he hates in order to pay for a house he loathes for a family he resents. It is a very bleak look at suburban life. And then without warning, on a seemingly normal afternoon, the parents begin to go crazy.
From here out the movie becomes a savage survival film for the children. The killings are extreme and coldhearted, almost like a zombie film except that the parents are complete aware of the outside world and able to engage in it normally (one guy casually checks his mail while covered in his child's blood)... just with an undying desire to murder their children. The initial kill sequence sets off the intensity that will resume throughout the rest of the movie. Showing up outside the gates of the school, the parents are able to break through the fences and overrun the school's security creating a melee in the school's football field. The first child killed has his eye stabbed out with car keys then there is chocking, strangulation and simple bludgeoning to death.
Most of the rest of the film takes place in the family's house where the daughter, who becomes aware of what is happening, tries to protect her brother as first the mom and then the dad arrive. There is a great scene when the daughter first arrives and begins asking the maid questions while she is cleaning up something on the ground. Eventually we discover it is a pool of blood left after the maid murdered her daughter. It is really disturbing to see the maid interact so pleasantly with the children while she absentmindedly mops up her daughter's blood. The parents eventually come home and trap the kids in the basement and fill it with gas. Eventually the kids get out but are once again trapped and about to be killed when the grandparents come over and try to kill the parents.
There are some really intense scenes. First and foremost, the birthing scene. Upon first hearing that the mom's sister is giving birth, the audience recognizes what this means so by the time the birth happens the anxiety has already been building for some time. After the birth, the child is given to the mother who immediately tries to crush it. What ensues is a tug-o-war over the child. This has got to be one of the more intense scenes in horror movies. Even after the baby is pulled from the mother, she keeps trying to attack the child. The film is so bizarre, that the viewer is not completely convinced that the filmmakers won't kill a baby. Luckily they don't. In another scene, the main daughter's boyfriend goes home to discover that his stepmom killed his stepsister before his dad tries to kill him with a broken bottle. The dad is able to get a few cuts into the son before the dad falls on the bottle cutting his throat. During his last moments of life as he bleeds out he is still trying to strangle the son. The son is then left to leave his father in a pool of blood.
The entire movie is really fun and the end of the film is actually funny, in a really dark way. Having completely forgotten that parents are also someone's children when the grandparents show up it's a "oh damn!" moment. Then, while the grandfather is chasing the father as he chases the son, the song "break these chains of love" plays ironically on the car's radio instantly helping to really make the scene a funny moment. People who grew up with punk rock will also recognize Anytown by Reagan Youth being played earlier by the father's character.
It is unpleasant to think that there is a part of our parents that resent us and for parents that there is a part of them that resents their children. But I think it is there, however small or large. Either way, this film takes that idea and runs with it. Violent, bloody, funny, and fun as hell. Give it a watch, it was streaming on Hulu last I checked.
...what's your thoughts?
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