Reed Alexander's Horror Review of 'Mom and Dad' (2017)

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST! Could they have made the teenage protagonist any more of a sanctimonious bitch? Is this really how teenage girls behave? I mean, I get rebellion. I get not jiving with your parents. Hell, I even understand needing to grow apart and get space. But this girl is just down right cruel. The shit she gets away with saying to her mother would have gotten my head knocked around like a bocce ball when I was her age. This girl and her friend smack of the mean popular girls that picked on kids in my high school. I had a strict policy of never hitting women, so I just made friends with bigger meaner girls and had them as a personal hit squad when the popular girls fucked with people. Needless to say, we didn't really have a lot of mean girls in my high school after that, so I'm not very familiar with the behavior. Are they really this awful?

I just hated every word that comes out of the protagonist's mouth. It was like nails on a chalk board and her friend was even worse. Her friend was inexplicably worse. She wasn't just awful, she was cunty to the point it was beyond self preservation. This is the kind of woman who would get drunk, go driving, get pulled over, mouth off to the cop, get tazed, get dragged to the tank, mouth off to a gang banger with the tattoos in the tank, get shived, and and still mouth off to the cops and the gang banger while she slowly bleeds to death.

Even worse, the protagonist's boyfriend is this really sweet, smart, good guy, and you have to wonder how he ended up with such a bitch. I'm 100 percent certain she's only dating him to piss off her dad. He's the sort of kid that she'll drop in a heart beat once she gets bored with him.

The whole thing comes off as how your typical Incel would define young women in high school. It doesn't seem real, it seems like someone's perception through a filter of sexism and racism. Here we have a horrible teenage brat, with literal Daddy issues, dating a black guy to piss off her pops... This is the kind of shit character writing that I am just done with. I'm over it. I'm sick to death of characters that are so obnoxious you hope they die. I've said it till I'm blue in the face. If the audience can empathizes with the characters, it draws them in, it invests them in the horror. It's simply more powerful.

Speaking of terrible characters, Cage hams it up again. He's just so over the fucking top. He's gone beyond Shatner, he's approaching Tommy Wiseau. Mind you, no one can go full Tommy Wiseau. That is reserved for the master himself. Cage, for the love of God, please leave horror for good and never come back.

You know what though? The story was actually pretty solid, outside of the shitty characters, and an ending that nearly made me pull my hair out. There were even some pretty cleaver scenes. The atmosphere was just right. There was a few things to really like about this movie.

But you know what? There were too few. This movie is just a different take of the movie "The Crazies" and that was better. You can give this a pass, it doesn't get my recommendation.

SPOILERS!!!

When I say that the protagonist's friend is cunty to the point of lacking self preservation? That was not an understatement. This dumb bitch narrowly gets out of her high school alive, she personally watches parents going total agro and murdering their children, shit is going down around her like it's the fucking apocalypse, and what does this girl do? She completely ignores her friend telling her to pay attention to what's going on around them and starts getting high and drunk. You mean to tell me she's not the least bit freaked out? Not a little? What the actual fuck. I found myself just muttering "would someone please kill this obnoxious bitch?"

You do learn some important things from this though. It basically confirms that parents are stricken with a drive to kill specifically their own kids, and if the kid isn't theirs then the kid is safe. But here's where things start to fall apart with the over arching premise. Some parents specifically seek out their kids to kill them. They hunt them down and basically don't stop until they kill them. But others, like the protagonist and her shitty friend's parents don't go psycho until the specific moment when they lay eyes on their kid. That's kind of a big hole.

Then there was this scene where Cage and his character's wife try to gas their kids who have locked themselves in the basement. Two problems with this scene. First, it takes very little gas at a pretty short exposure period to kill. The two kids would either notice they were getting symptomatic and use the crawlspace to sneak out, or they would notice too late and die. Here's my take on the situation. The protagonist sets up a trap to spark the gas and blow the joint once they're safely in the crawl space. The trap sparks at the top of the stairs to the basement. That means the whole basement needed to be full of enough gas for the spark at the top of the stairs to set off the gas. That means the kids, by all rights, have been exposed to the gas long enough to already be dead. The movie should basically end right here. So basically it does for me. But of course the movie doesn't end there. The kids escape into the crawl space, the gas goes up, and Cage get's toasted. Now, that should be the end of Cage. A fire ball like that would cook a man in seconds, leaving a burning husk. But Cage survives with minor burns... riiiiiigggghhhhhht!!!!!!

But suffering through that garbage brought me to Lance motherfucking Henrickson! Lance plays Cage's Dad. And guess who comes home to knife Cage! My god that was just so much fun. Lance chases Cage around the house shanking him. It's magnificent. It almost makes up for Cage being in the movie.

I wanted everything for this movie to end with Cage ganking the snot nosed protagonist, and Lance ganking Cage. If that happened, I would give this movie a pass... but it didn't. It ended with the sanctimonious little brat shoving her mother's words in her face victoriously. I just wanted to scream.Fuck this movie. Fuck the writer. Fuck that snotty little protagonist. Fuck Cage. Fuck the whole thing.