beorhouse
Ever wonder what the American Dream was really all about? You know, the Post-War Dream? I lived through it, and it wasn't all backyard barbecues and family vacations. This work of art stands as the perfect metaphor for those times which seem so long ago for many people alive today, but those of us 50 years or older know how things really were behind the smiles and friendly nods--not so peaceful, as the Beat, Civil Rights, and Hippie movements showed us. Movie about people eating other people? Sure, if you must. But what is actually on display is something far more sinister, and real. Life devoid of love and forgiveness does a real number on people. Now, all the theology set aside, if you love black humor, this is the film for you. Forget that stupid movie Pleasantville and dive right into this nasty little slice of Horror. You won't be sorry you did. I've seen it multiple times since its release in 1989, and I'm still watching it.
shamswalidasad
Fantastic film however, its not for everyone, if you are a fan of horror, creepiness and weirdness, and can appreciate art and have a very artistic point of view on films you will totally love this! Plus, the acting is fantastic, the father nails the part of being scarily creepy, and the kid also did wonderful. like I said it's not for everyone, you might really love love this or you might completely hate it. It completely depends, so do give it a try.
Michael_Elliott
Parents (1989) *** (out of 4)Michael (Bryan Madorsky) moves to a new town with his parents (Randy Quaid, Mary Beth Hurt) and before long he starts to notice that there's something not quite right with them. The more Michael starts to understand the more he begins to think that his parents are cannibals.PARENTS is a film that I saw in my local VHS store countless times growing up but I never bothered to rent it. It was on cable countless times I again I never got around to watching it. I got the DVD but never watched it. Finally, nearly thirty-years after it was made, I finally watched the movie and I must admit that I'm disappointed in myself for not watching it earlier. If you're looking for a masterpiece horror film then this obviously isn't one but if you're looking for something a bit different then you should enjoy what this offers.What I liked the most about this film is the fact that it was set in the 1950s and it reminded me a lot of the films from that era. The main theme is that the kid finds his parents to be weird, which is something that a lot of kids think about their parents. I thought this film perfectly captured that sense of a kid's fears quite nicely and best of all is that the film reminded me of those in the 50's that dealt with the same thing. INVADERS FROM MARS certainly comes to mind but there were others as well.This film really benefits from some very good performances by everyone in the cast but especially the three leads. Quaid and Hurt are both fantastic as the parents as they perfectly play up the weirdness of the couple without having to go over-the-top or resort to any type of camp. Their performances are very realistic and I enjoyed the nature of both. Madorsky was a real find as he's excellent here and in all reality he actually carries the picture. I thought he was a lot of fun as was Sandy Dennis and London Juno.Director Bob Balaban does a very good job with the material and he keeps the film moving at a nice pace. There's a mix of horror and comedy here but one is never stronger than the other and this style and atmosphere is certainly a lot different than what most horror films from this period were delivering. Fans of non-stop blood baths might be disappointed but those who enjoy a more offbeat film should enjoy PARENTS.
RorschachKovacs
Many critics seem eager to find some moral metaphor in the movie Parents to serve some political pet cause of theirs. Some films do have an obviously moral point to make, but Parents is not one of them. Other critics who attempt psychoanalysis of the movie's child protagonist Michael do have some rather fascinating hypotheses and alternate interpretations of events that occur in this movie, but I contend that the movie works quite well enough when taken at face value: it's just a story about a fairly ordinary (if rather shy and withdrawn) little boy whose suspicions about where his parents are getting their meat prove to be well founded, and how he deals with this rather disturbing situation.Most who attempt to categorize this film place it firmly in the horror comedy genre, claiming that it uses the parents' cannibalism to "satirize" family life in the suburbs in the 1950s. While the conclusion is valid enough, I contend that this premise is faulty: at no point does the movie Parents ever make fun of the 1950s, the nuclear family, or suburbia. (In fact, the beauty of the setting actually makes it look like growing up in a nuclear family in the suburbs in the 1950s would actually be pretty swell, as long as you didn't happen to have cannibals or domestic abusers for parents.) Actually, there are really only two real jokes in this movie. One of these is rather a meta-joke, since it's the title. In the tradition of a great many "animal attack" horror flicks, the title of Parents manages to name the central threat of the movie in just one word; and just to take the absurdity a little more over the top, it's scribbled across the cover in clichéd dripping red lettering. Thus does whoever titled this movie manage to lampoon this tradition by pointing out that nearly any noun scrawled across a cover in dripping red is a convincing title for a horror movie. The other joke, at the end of the movie, is basically the punchline to the whole story: yeah, if your parents' mystery meat turned out to be human flesh, you'd never trust another meat sandwich anyone handed you either, would you?If this movie really does have any purpose other than to play upon our common childhood fears for fun and profit, I'd say it's to point out the difference between an imagined horror and the real thing. One way Parents keeps us guessing about Michael's suspicions is by repeatedly showing us that his imagination tends to exaggerate traumatic memories. In flashbacks to a mildly traumatic incident in which he caught his (still mostly clothed) parents engaging in sexual foreplay, for instance, his imagination turns the lipstick they both had smeared on their mouths into a great splatter of blood dripping from their chins as if they'd just been messily devouring a raw corpse. While one can easily understand how his imagination could mix up two taboo subjects that are otherwise unrelated, this does call the accuracy of all his other perceptions into question.This difference, in fact, is at the heart of the entire conflict on which the story turns. Splattering characters and scenery with blood makes sense in war stories, since the chaos of war typically doesn't allow anybody on the job much time to take care of personal hygiene. For stories in more orderly settings, such as a relatively prosperous 1950s suburban neighborhood, having everyone splattered with blood makes no sense whatsoever. As historians and sociologists can testify, anyone who actually butchers humans on a regular basis typically sanitizes this practice as much as possible through ceremony and ritual and orderly disposal of the remains. In keeping with this reality, what actual cannibalism Michael encounters in this movie is all very sanitary: evidently, his parents are very careful to drain off any excess blood before processing their "long pork" for dinner. The only bloody messes we ever see until the final act are in Michael's overactive imagination.To Parents' credit, once it's revealed that yes, Michael's parents really are cannibals, the focus shifts immediately not to his disgust and horror at the cannibalism itself, but to the moral dilemma of what to do now that he knows. As his father points out, Michael doesn't really get along with society and its mores any better than they do, his only friend being a similarly quirky young girl who's a bit of an outcast herself. Also, try as he might to deny it, he and his parents really do love each other, and if he exposes their crimes to the world, he'll lose them. His parents haven't personally wronged him, and there's been nothing to indicate they'd ever killed anybody before now. Yet they demand at the very least that he stay silent about a murder they've just committed, and are pressing him to join them in eating the victim.The way out of this dilemma this movie ultimately provides Michael, I think, proves just a little too morally convenient for the audience, though no less viscerally disturbing. Still, as in another masterpiece of horror, V.C. Andrews' infamous novel Flowers In The Attic, this movie does demonstrate the truly horrifying reality that under enough stress even true love can go cold and even genuinely loving relationships be destroyed. For all his strictness and vaguely creepy behavior, I like to think that originally, Michael's father really did love his son; as for his mother, the movie leaves no doubt that she loved her son right to the bitter end, even as she still loved his father.In the end, the greatest horror this horror movie provokes in its viewers is the moral horror of Michael's being forced to choose between the loving thing to do and the right thing to do; which in the final analysis, is the most compelling kind of horror of all.
