Mum & Dad **½ (2008, Perry Benson, Dido Miles, Olga Fedori, Ainsley Howard) – Classic Movie Review 4624

Writer-director Steven Sheil’s 2008 low-budget British horror thriller film is well made and resourceful but deeply unpleasant.

It starts with young Polish Heathrow Airport office cleaner Lena (Olga Fedori) accompanying an apparently friendly co-worker called Birdie (Ainsley Howard) home, only to find herself imprisoned by Mum and Dad – her workmate’s insane parents.

Frighteningly realistic, this is vile stuff. But Dido Miles and Perry Benson give very good performances indeed in their sick roles of Mum and Dad, whose family work at the airport, living off what they can scavenge, while running a nightmarish suburban house of horrors of torture, murder and perversity.

It runs 84 minutes but the Extreme Unrated Edition runs 90 minutes.

Sheil wrote the script in four weeks and the film was shot fast in just 18 days, averaging 27 set-ups a day, for a £100,000 cost. Five locations were used for the house.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 4624

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