October Horror Challenge 2022 #116: "Mom and Dad"

I heard a little bit about this movie when it came out. I usually try to avoid spoilers, but I ascertained that this is a movie where parents kill their kids, and that kind of stuff is a big trigger for me with my twisted family history. I think i mentioned before that I used to love Nicholas Cage when I was younger, and I used to love Selma Blair too (and I feel so old that I'm now at an age where I have to talk about Selma Blair as an actress I "used to love when I was younger," because she doesn't seem that old to me) so I was excited to see them together in this movie. Let's do this thing!

In this movie, a young teenage girl and her little brother try to survive a wild 24 hours during which a mass hysteria of unknown origins causes parents to turn violently on their own children. It starts quietly, with a news report on the radio about a mom who reportedly attacked her own kid, mostly ignored by the family as they have dinner and argue about regular family things like boys and dates and visits with grandparents. The tension slowly builds as little things hint that something is wrong, A school day is interrupted a few times by phone calls, a few parents appear to become irrationally angry about some things, there's a bomb scare at the school, something is rotten in the state of Denmark, then suddenly everything starts to happen all at once.

I've been through bomb scares at school, and though chaotic, none that were as bad as this one, thankfully. And then the movie really starts, parents want to kill their kids. They're like violent killing machines who won't stop untill their kids are dead. The hysteria, or whatever it is that makes the parents go against their natural urges to protect their kids and suddenly want to kill them, makes them like little terminators bent on distruction and nothing will stop them until they've completed their task and killed their kids. This is supposed to be a black comedy, but I don't see the comedy here in parents wanting to kill their kids. There's one scene where grandma and grandpa show up that made me laugh, so I'm guessing a lot of this is supposed to be funny and I didn't get it on account of being the most humorless person in all the land. There's plenty of biting social commentary here though, and there's sufficient gore and violence going on to keep most horror fans happy. This is a nasty little flick and I'm glad I checked it out.