NOTE: This review is actually by TelstarMan, I just brought it back from the dead. Enjoy!
To make up for my rather brief review for UP FROM THE DEPTHS I thought I'd review another cannibalism movie. This one, like
Motel ####, is a video that I already own. What the #### is my deal?
Parents is a movie that plays out a great deal like a half-remembered dream. It's also made by someone who remembers exactly what childhood could be like, and not at all a sunny, nostalgic look back at a time when every single person you knew was bigger and stronger than you.
Brian Madorsky stars as Michael Laemele, a thin and weak-looking boy of about ten. He and his parents are moving into a new small suburban slice of heaven in the mid-1950s. He's apprehensive about everything, looking out at the world with wide, solemn and frightened eyes.
And with good reason. As its inclusion into this month's movies should tell you, Brian's parents are cannibals. He starts to realize this rather gradually. At first he's just disturbed by dreams of swimming in a deep pool of blood and wondering why the family eats more leftovers than original meals. By the end of the film it's all horrifyingly clear. You can totally tell that David Lynch would like this movie--it's all about the seething, chaotic evil that can lie under the bland veneer of small town America. You can also tell that the people who made
Ravenous saw this; both films feature some of the most revoltingly photographed meat I've ever seen. They almost outpace the Gallery of Regrettable Food at
http://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/index.html (and don't say I didn't warn you).
I have to single out Randy Quaid's performance in this movie. He's a seething, hulking presence in his son's life. He overshadows Michael in every shot they're in together and every time he smiles it's the vicious grin of Dad when he's had one beer too many watching the afternoon game and you have to step lightly or he'll smack you a good one. I'm pretty sure that
You Call Yourself A Scientist? called Quaid's performance the personification of "Wait until your father gets home" and I can't top that.
The scene that gives me the worst chills is one that resonates with everyone who's ever been a kid (and one that was used to great effect in
The Sixth Sense. The school counsellor asks why Michael's classroom drawings are so twisted and bloody and he confesses that he thinks his parents might be monsters. Not only doesn't she believe him but he knows that he's going to be in serious, possibly lethal trouble if his father ever finds out what he knows.
By the end of the film Michael's parents have given up on him. He knows full well what's in store for him as his father roars that they'll have a new kid, and bring him up
right this time. And I leave you there. See the film if you want to know what happens at the end. Both this and the earlier-reviewed
Motel #### are pitch black comedies about a nigh-universal taboo. And as either Soren Kierkegaard or Hawkeye Pierce once said, sometimes you have to laugh if you want to open your mouth without screaming.
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Tim Lehnerer -- The Iron Skeptic
TelstarMan@yahoo.com
See you at B-Fest 2002!
