‘Mom & Dad’: Film Review | TIFF 2017 - Hollywood Reporter
Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair get their crazy on as parents hell-bent on killing their own
children in Brian Taylor's black-comedy horror flick.
The kind of rip-snorting, relatively cheap and cheerful black comedy the industry doesn’t make enough of anymore, Mom & Dad is a deliciously lurid throwback to cult fare like Parents, Heathers, Serial Mom, early Gregg Araki movies and other to-the-bone horror-driven skewerings of suburban pieties. Fueled by a great premise — something throws the instinct in parents to protect their kids into reverse, resulting in a worldwide epidemic of filicide — in an earlier era, this would have had a long life in repertory cinemas as a midnight special, but these days it will probably have a swift run around the theatrical circuit before hitting the streaming platforms. Even so, Mom & Dad will do no damage to the careers of leads Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair, both in top antic form here, and writer-director Brian Taylor (the Crank franchise, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance).
End titles reveal that some tract-house covered stretch of Kentucky was used as a location, although this could be happening anywhere in America where families live in McMansions adorned with cheesy homiletic wall decorations extolling familial harmony, attend anonymous-looking high schools and work out at Zumba classes.
The Ryan family — dad Brent (Cage), mom Kendall (Blair), high-school sophomore Carly (Anne Winters) and pre-adolescent Joshua (Zachary Arthur) — are typical affluent middle-class Americans, with typical middle-class American levels of dysfunction. Brent secretly longs for the days when he did donuts in his Trans Am while his teen girlfriend shoved her bosom in his face. Kendall feels empty and lost now that her kids are growing up and she has no career, while her relationship with sulky Carly is steadily deteriorating as the latter’s center of gravity shifts toward her shallow friends and her boyfriend Damon (Robert T. Cunningham). Brent disapproves of the latter because, he says, he’s a junior, although clearly the problem for Brent is that Damon is black.
One day, some inexplicable force that seems to express itself through TV static (shades of Videodrome) triggers parents everywhere to develop murderous desires to kill their own children, a wittily literal expression of the rage all parents experience with their progeny at times. Taylor’s script slyly name-checks those even more taboo feelings of resentment and jealousy parents feel, especially in the case of Kendall’s cougar-ish friend (Samantha Lemole), who will eventually end up choking her own child, Carly’s bratty buddy Riley (Olivia Crocicchia), to death.
In strictly genre terms, it’s refreshing to see a film willing to create a new kind of monster here out of the parents who are seen at one point massing, zombie-like, at the school gates, like it’s some kind of evil pickup time from hell. Except they’re not zombies, they’re sentient beings just like they’ve always been, except with an insatiable desire to kill their offspring. This means they’re still capable of talking, running fast and problem-solving, so when, for example, Carly and Joshua lock themselves in the basement to escape Brent and Kendall, mom fetches the handy Sawzall reciprocating saw to tackle the door. (One can’t help wondering if Sawzall are in on the joke and paid for this sinister product placement, especially since Cage keeps announcing with maniacal glee that this DIY tool “saws all!”)
Zero-to-60 speed crazy is pretty much right in Cage’s wheelhouse, and he offers up a perfectly amusing comical workout of the madman shtick he could pretty much do in this sleep at this point. More impressive is Blair, a chronically underused talent who gets to demonstrate her already established flair for comedy and more besides in a role to which she brings a surprisingly level of nuance. Both Winters and Arthur as the hapless fruit of their loins are sturdy and more held back. The same couldn’t be said for Marilyn Dodds Frank and Lance Henriksen, all popping eyes and weapon-wielding mania, who make a hilarious last-act entrance that turns out to be one of the film’s best punchlines.
A lurid color palette helps to amp up the fun, as does the whizz-bang brutal cutting of editors Rose Corr and Fernando Villena.
Toronto Film Review: ‘Mom & Dad' - Variety
This slapstick romp couches its social critiques of shallow materialism and casual racism in breakneck action.
“We love you but sometimes we just want to kill you” is a thought that crosses nearly every frazzled parents’ mind sooner or later. That figurative sentiment is taken all too literally in “Mom & Dad,” which finds the gonzo sensibility that writer-director Brian Taylor applied most usefully to the “Crank” action movies working at least as well in comedic horror. Though sure to be distasteful for some viewers even to ponder, this giddy exercise transcends mere bad-taste humor to become one of the great jet-black comedies about suburbia, destined for the same cult-classic status accorded “The Stepford Wives,” “Parents” and “Heathers.”
After a particularly good example of the 1970s genre pic homage that has infiltrated so many movies’ opening credits of late, we settle into discordant ordinary life on a seemingly ordinary day on a generic middle-class cul-de-sac in Whateversburg, USA (the movie was shot in Kentucky). Our protagonists are likewise very ordinary, if dysfunctional: Cellphone-glued teenage daughter Carly (Anne Winters) rendezvous with her forbidden (black!) boyfriend, Damon (Robert Cunningham); little bro Joshua (Zackary Arthur) is a bratty little terror who’s about 10. Brent (Nicolas Cage) can still pull it together to be the “fun dad,” but simmering just beneath that is a volcano of midlife-crisis resentment. All this wears heavily on mom Kendall (Selma Blair), who sacrificed her career and any other outside life for a family that no longer seems to appreciate her.
As they go their separate ways for yet another day of work, school, aerobics class, etc., it gradually emerges that something inexplicable has occurred. (There are vague hints that some kind of neurological virus transmitted by TV and computer screens has brought “mass hysteria.”) It’s only when a full-on bloodbath erupts on the high school football field that audience, the characters and then the mass media begin to grasp what’s going on: For whatever reason, parents have suddenly developed a compulsive urge to kill their children.
Realizing Joshua may be in mortal danger, Carly makes her way home through the now carnage-strewn suburban landscape — while, unfortunately, a newly energized Mom & Dad are also heading there, with a vengeance. The resulting standoff soon sees the kids lock themselves in the basement, with their parents using every unscrupulous means to get at them. Just when you think the situation is tapped-out, Taylor throws in a monkey-wrench with the arrival of Brent’s parents (Lance Hendricksen, Marilyn Dodds Frank), who were expected for dinner but bring something else to the party.
Couching its social critiques — of shallow materialism, casual racism and other privileged woes — in breakneck action and merciless splatstick, “Mom & Dad” is a gas. Taylor and his terrific tech/design collaborators avoid wearing out the joke with just enough spry variation in tone and pace, alleviating the frequently frenetic content with stretches of ironic lyricism and even poignancy. (Credit for that should be fully shared with d.p. Daniel Pearl, editors Rose Corr and Fernando Villena, composer Mr. Bill and music supervisor Ryan Gaines, all of whom knock it out of the park.)
The juvenile actors play it straight, with skill; the adults get the more interesting task of conveying various balances of cartoon and genuine menace. An unlikely star from the start, whose shaky choices of late have imperiled that status, Cage has always been at his best in precisely this zone of maniacal comic invention. That you see him doing variations here on what he’s done before doesn’t lessen the performance’s unpredictable, inspired hilarity.
Blair, on the other hand, feels somehow underappreciated even if she’s hardly been underemployed. She covers a gamut from bittersweet sympathy to farce to monstrousness, running amok like a cat on piano keys, yet hitting each note perfectly. “Mom & Dad” isn’t the kind of movie they give acting awards to — but in a just world, it would be.