Review: Mom and Dad

Mom and Dad (15)

USA 2017 86 mins  Dir: Brian Taylor  Cast: Nicolas Cage, Selma Blair, Anne Winters, Lance Henriksen, Zachary Arthur

Remember when Nicolas Cage was the toast of the arthouse crowd, winning an Oscar for his performance in Leaving Las Vegas and starring in David Lynch’s cult perennial Wild at Heart? Then came his financially debilitating castle-buying habit. Lately, he’s found himself obliged to take roles in any old shit, churning out dozens of terrible films a year. But whenever you find one of these lurking at the bottom of a bargain bin, you know that however awful it may be Cage will never be less than thoroughly entertaining – especially when low-rent directors have the good sense to let him off the leash to go full psycho. In truth, he was actually doing this turn as early as 1989’s batshit-crazy Vampire’s Kiss. But we’ve only been given flashes of it in recent years. Take Joel Schumacher’s Trespass, for example: one of three films for which Cage was Razzie nominated (along with Drive Angry and Season of the Witch) in 2011. It’s worth sitting through all woeful 91 minutes of this cheesy home invasion thriller just for the moment when he contorts his face and snaps at fellow slumming Oscar winner Nicole Kidman: “Your filthy lust invited them in!”

Which brings us to Mom and Dad from Brian Taylor, who previously directed Cage in the – you guessed it – woeful Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. It’s a brave director who’ll risk enraging the self-righteous Twittermob by playing a US high school slaughter for laughs in the current climate, but Taylor uses this to signal his intention to drive a heavily armed coach and horses through notions of good taste before letting loose with the full Cage Rage, complete with howling, barking, twitching, shouting and the total destruction of an innocent pool table. It’s a marvellous, eminently quotable (“Your MOTHERFUCKING mother said open this MOTHERFUCKING door. And you FUCKERS are going to open this MOTHERFUCKING door!“)  unhinged rampage, but we have to wait a full 40 minutes for Taylor to remove the choke chain, wind up his star and let him go.

We’re in identikit US suburbia, where dissatisfied middle class parents Brent (Cage) and Kendall (Blair) are raising their two children – stroppy, self-obsessed adolescent Carly (Winters) and bratty pre-teen Joshua (Arthur) – in an atmosphere of simmering, low-level discontent. An ordinary American family, in other words. Then parents start turning on their own children, tearing them limb from limb. Taylor doesn’t allow himself to become sidetracked into exploring why this should have happened, beyond suggesting that it’s precipitated by some kind of Videodrome-style TV static (though one briefly glimpsed TV pundit suggests that wiping out an entire generation in this way would be a highly effective terrorist act), largely because he’s having too much fun with a parent chucking a pushchair into the path of an oncoming car and a new mother attempting to throttle her own nipper the moment it pops out of the womb.

In among all the carnage, there’s some sly and subversive commentary on gun control, the thwarting of the American Dream, parents’ jealousy of their children’s burgeoning sexuality (one of Cage’s most enjoyable rants concerns the smorgasbord of porn available to today’s teens on the internet, while he had to make do with his own imagination) and the toxicity of the nuclear family. As Carly’s boyfriend puts it: “I used to think my parents getting divorced was the worst thing in my life. But ironically that shit doubled my chance of survival.” There’s even a smidgen of Get Out-style racial politics, and if you look for them you’ll also find references to everything from Taxi Driver to The Shining.

But let’s not get carried away here: this is at heart a brisk and trashy exploitation B-Movie, and all the better for it. While Cage eats up the screen, along with most of the scenery, the criminally under-used, hugely talented Selma Blair more than holds her own, getting a terrific monologue about the disappointments of motherhood. When it comes to picking at the scabs of conformist suburban American family life, Mom and Dad earns its place alongside Bob Balaban’s Parents, John Waters’ Serial Mom and Brian Yuzna’s Society.