Mom and Dad ** (2017, Nicolas Cage, Selma Blair, Anne Winters, Zackary Arthur) – Movie Review

Writer-director Brian Taylor’s Mom and Dad has its charms, though it is far from charming. To be fair, it doesn’t set out to be charming but nevertheless to charm you with its whacked-out sense (?) of humour. Basically, Mom and Dad has no sense and makes no sense in it tale of. That is its point, I guess, if it has one. It is nonsense and pointless, in the way perhaps like Alice in Wonderland is, though Mom and Dad is a very dark take on a fairy tale.

You’ve got to hand it Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair. They go to it with a will as Mom and Dad, among the local American parents who turn violently on their own kids for a wild 24 hours for no darned reason at all. There are shades of The Purge here maybe.

The parents are killing children for  no darned reason at all. Funny that – and dead weird. I’d really have appreciated a reason for all this, but then nobody says that about The Birds. The birds attack for unexplained reasons, it is up to the viewers to make up their minds as to why. Ultra subtle and clever, or just slack and lazy?  It is up to the viewers to make up their minds.

Naturally this gives Cage a chance to be hysterical, and so he is in a tour-de-force turn and he is occasionally hysterically funny too – just watch him bust up a snooker table in the basement, and that ‘Hokey Pokey’ thing is scary! Blair is pretty intense too, holding her own against Cage.

Anne Winters and Zackary Arthur play the couple’s teenage daughter Carly and her little brother Josh who must survive their idiot, deranged parents during the mass hysteria. Lance Henriksen and Marilyn Dodds Frank turn up belatedly as the grandparents Mel and Barbara Ryan. They are really rather fun, and I’d like to have seen a lot more of them.

If it is a dark satire on American violence, as it almost certainly must be, it is obscure to the point of bewilderment. As a horror thriller, it works a bit better, though, kicking up some tense scenes and scary moments.

If you click the button on the movie that says ‘like’, which I kind of do, up pops another message to say ‘confirm’, and then it asks ‘do you want to like this [film]?’ And now the answer is, I don’t know. Not much, I guess, not too much anyway, but there again I didn’t really dislike it either. It isn’t a very good movie, but it isn’t a bad one. They gone for something, tried it out and pressed the ‘full on’ button throughout, so its stays into the not bad movie category, though only just.

Cage is always welcome in low-budget, crazed-out performances, and here he freaks out magnificently, so that alone is worth the price of admission, and Blair is quite a revelation, making a real chilly mom. Winters and Arthur are good too.

Taylor wrote and directed Crank, Crank: High Voltage and Gamer, and directed Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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