2018’s “Mom and Dad“, written and directed by Brian Taylor.
Starring Anne Winters, Zackary Arthur, Nicholas Cage, Selma
Blair, Robert T. Cunningham, Olivia
Crocicchia, Samantha Lemole. Lance Henriksen, and Marilyn Dodds Frank.
What is it about?
Taking place in present day, in a ubiquitous suburban
American town, we meet a nuclear family. Parents Nicholas Cage and Selma Blair
are both firmly ensconced in the throes of middle age, with their teenage
daughter, Anne Winters, discovering her own secret world, and young son,
Zackary Arthur, who’s house tidying skills aren’t as developed as his parents
would like. One day, an innocuous television beamed signal makes the parents of
the town begin to try to murder their own spawn. With every child a target of
their parent’s unconscious wrath, will they be able to survive the horrid
perversions of maternity and paternity?
Why is it worth seeing?
Everyone who’s had children (and some of those who haven’t,
too) know that child rearing can be a frustrating, infuriating, and thankless
task. Lord knows, we’ve all been to the point where we would imagine doing
things to our children that would certainly net us jail time. Mom and Dad take this premise, and
extend it to something akin to a zombie outbreak.
Director/Writer Bryan Taylor comes up with the right amount
of camp to turn this grisly subject matter into a gloriously demented funhouse
genre flick. We meet Selma Blair’s character, who is struggling through the
realities of her children growing into their own interests- and having to start
to clumsily explore hers again. Inserted at the centre of the lunacy, the king of the crazy town parade, is
Nicholas Cage. The unhappy father of a nuclear family, his character pines for
the good ol’ days when he worked at menial jobs and had multiple sexual
partners. Seen at work sleeping at his desk and avoiding his family, his
subsequent additional psychic break almost feels like a welcome release.
Taylor’s original take on very disturbed parents, which doubles
as a metaphor into mid life crisis ennui, sometimes has some unnecessary
flashbacks, and you wish the kids would just figure out the floor plan of their
own home, but it’s a lot of fun when it’s focused on its wacko genre premise,
and its running time of 83 minutes is a blessing.
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