Movie Review - Parents

There's a reason why plot ideas like Parents generally end up in a Tales from the Crypt episode rather than a full-length movie. It's because the idea behind parents who are secretly trying to feed their kid human parts can only last so long as a suspenseful yet still mysterious plot point; after a while, the central focus of this story can only lead to two outcomes, that either the parents are indeed feeding young Eddie bits and pieces from the latest cadavers or that Eddie is just delusional and has some sort of Freudian mommy issue. Parents stretches this playful tug-of-war between two conclusions to a full hour and a half, and it just doesn't work as well as it could (and does) work in a short anthology episode.

A lot of suspense is generated thanks to a laid-back (and pre-tax evasion) Randy Quaid, who stars as the Boy's father. He's a chemist at the local Toxico, a company we can only imagine started something quite similar to the zombie outbreak in Return of the Living Dead Part II. Throughout, Quaid gives a surly, sulking performance, often eerily stoic and then quickly transforming into a rage-filled cannibal. The same goes for the Boy's mother, although her character is often more charming, less temperamental, and more understanding of the Boy's boycott of eating the family meat (now that sounds dirty).

It helps that the Boy's family life is sufficiently odd, because there's a tense atmosphere created whenever he's at home, because you just don't know how his father will react (probably much like Quaid himself). And the Boy also finds a girl friend (we'll keep those two words separate since the Boy can be a little bashful) who evokes the same sense of strangeness, although in a much more juvenile way that actually makes her creepier than the folks.

The characterization is actually quite good, and that's because it's really one of the only aspects that makes Parents a flowing narrative. Without the Boy's recurring bad dreams about his parents' coital bliss, without the brief moments where the Boy stumbles upon some dark secret of his father's, Parents would simply be about a boy with strange parents, a stagnant plotline done before.

It still sort of is, and despite its billing as a dark comedy, Parents really isn't that funny. It's sometimes grotesquely comical, the way you might laugh at something that makes you uncomfortable. But it's never outright jokey, which makes some of the scenes even more disturbing. But then again, it never really elevates itself from the stale plot of parents as would-be cannibals.

And when the conclusion hits, it manages to cannibalize the entirety of the film by portraying not a twist but a simple, foreseeable ending; I'll give you hint and say that it's one of the two outlined above. It's not that Parents needed a mindblowing twist - it just didn't do anything that a half-hour episode couldn't do much more succinctly.