{jatabs type="content" position="top" height="auto" skipAnim="true" mouseType="click" animType="animFade"}
[tab title="Movie Review"]
Think you’ve seen Nicolas Cage unhinged in a movie before? Think again.
A young mother parks her SUV on some railroad tracks. Her child is in the backseat. She gets out of the car as the crossing guard comes down. A train is coming. And she, making sure the child is still in the car, walks off the tracks as the train rams the car, killing her child instantly.
Parents are supposed to love their kids. Unconditionally. But not in this cracked movie. Welcome to the Terrordome, son. Mom and Dad starts out on a big canvas - cable news and schools and all - but then confines us to one room in one house and the switcheroo is pretty solid in creating suspense and establishing mood.
Parents, we know, shouldn’t act out of anger when deprived of sleep and completely frustrated by their kids shitty and disrespectful attitudes. But…but…but what if – as is the case in writer/director Brian Taylor’s completely outrageous new horror film – parents, completely fed up by their brats thieving ways and younger bodies, turned on their own kids and went straight for the jugular?
Leave it to one half of the Crank duo to think this bizarro scenario up and, with the same gonzo spirit that infected his previous films, actually put it on film.
Mom and Dad, starring Selma Blair and Nicolas Cage, is a wild horror film that is completely out of its own cracked skull. And that’s a damn good reason to love the hell out of it. Damn funny, violent, and completely on point in all its raging ways, this is one horror flick whose frenzied spirit – as parents literally tear into their own kids – never dissipates.
But it starts with the kids. Carly (Anne Winters) – a high-school sophomore who is dating Damon (Robert T. Cunningham) and, apparently, her cell phone – and her bratty brother, Josh (Zackary Arthur), really don’t appreciate their messed-up parents. It’s not hard to see why. Brent (Cage) is in the middle of a mid-life crisis and his wife, Kendall (Blair), is a bit bitter about everything.
It’s a typical suburban life UNTIL the day ALL the parents attack. They show up at school, knocking on the doors, running off the security officers, and then chasing their own kids down in the football and track field, murdering them right there and then. Pretty fucked up, right?
It gets worse. New mothers squeeze their babies too tight in cold hospitals. Coaches take on their own brood with the swing of an aluminum bat. The cable news absolutely explodes with scenes of violence as parents devour their young. Heads roll. Limbs are severed.
Blair, who gets to show another side of her acting persona with this brazen performance of a handy mother, gets bloody and buck wild with power tools as she tries to outsmart her own daughter. And then she, too, loses her cool. Add to this all the flashbacks we get showcasing the marriage and the raising of the kids and we get quite the ranging performance.
And then there is Nicolas Cage. Already on the margins thanks to dealing with his bratty kid, his lunatic performance here – both before and after the strange sequence of events that causes every parent everywhere to turn on their kid – is one for the Cage-lovers to absolutely drool over. He becomes the fringe. He’s completely mad with an edgy performance that makes him kill, kill, and kill again. Even the simplest of songs – think Hokey Pokey – becomes poetry in his spouting and shouting mouth.
And Taylor, calming down just a bit from his Crank years, brings it together in a swift delivery that is both jarring and damn consequential as teenagers take to the streets to escape their parental units and their bloody attacks. And this, hilariously enough, extends to even the (wait for it) grandparents.
Think you are in trouble now? Just you wait until Mom and Dad get home. The horror film is now playing in select cities.
[/tab]
[tab title="Details"]
MPAA Rating: R for disturbing horror violence, language throughout, some sexual content/nudity and teen drug use.
Runtime: 83 mins
Director: Brian Taylor
Writer: Brian Taylor
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Selma Blair, Anne Winters
Genre: Horror
Tagline: Moom and Dad.
Memorable Movie Quote: "Multiple reports are now coming in of parents mudering their children."
Theatrical Distributor: Momentum Pictures
Official Site:
Release Date: January 18, 2018
DVD/Blu-ray Release Date: No details available.
Synopsis: A teenage girl and her little brother must survive a wild 24 hours during which a mass hysteria of unknown origins causes parents to turn violently on their own kids.
[/tab]
[tab title="Blu-ray Review"]
No details available.
[/tab]
[tab title="Trailer"]
[/tab]
[tab title="Art"]
[/tab]
{/jatabs}
