Horror-comedy 'Mom and Dad' explores dark side of parental resentment
<h3 class="briefHead">"Mom and Dad" - ★ ★ </h3>
Brian Taylor's ultra-black horror comedy "Mom and Dad" squeezes a few guilty chortles from a gleefully sadistic and absurdly heightened take on parents' love/hate relationships with their kids.
A mother shoves her baby's carriage into moving traffic.
Another mom parks her car on the train tracks, with her kid stuck inside.
Over at the high school, happy parents show up to greet their surprised children. The real surprise? The dads and moms start suffocating them with plastic bags and cutting them up with knives.
"Mom and Dad" takes place in a middle-class neighborhood (shot in Kentucky) with cookie-cutter houses and manicured lawns right out of the opening of David Lynch's "Blue Velvet."
High-school sophomore Carly Ryan (Anne Winters) plays with her smartphone on the way to school, ignoring her frustrated mom, Kendall (Selma Blair), and her attempts to communicate.
Dad Brent (Nicolas Cage) goes about his soulless existence, flashing back to his youth when he drove a Trans Am with a naked girl on his lap, setting up the parental resentment that fuels his desire to kill Carly and her brother Josh (Zackary Arthur).
Cage doesn't disappoint. The actor again pulls the pin on another one of his human hand grenades, resulting in an explosively over-the-top performance the rest of "Mom and Dad" can't match.
Taylor suggests our obsession with technology can be dangerous - the inspiration for parental homicide emanates from the white noise on omnipresent TV sets - but never develops the premise.
His loopy screenplay bravely treads into taboo territory, but falls more toward shock and exploitation than perverse fun and enlightened truth.
"Get Out" it ain't.
<b>Starring:</b> Nicolas Cage, Selma Blair, Anne Winters, Zackary Arthur, Lance Hendricksen, Robert Cunningham, Olivia Crocicchia
<b>Directed by:</b> Brian Taylor
<b>Other:</b> A Momentum Picture release. At South Barrington 24 and Facets Multimedia in Chicago. Rated R for drug use, language, nudity, sexual situations, violence. 123 minutes