Mom and Dad (2018) Review

The concept for the 2018 horror-comedy Mom And Dad is pretty good on paper. In fact, there was plenty of material to work with said premise, in which one can take different routes in mocking both  modern and old american suburbia.

However, what Mom and Dad ends up to be is a disjointed mess, filled with cringe worthy moments, that both don't succeed in creating a passable parody of the genre that it's attempting to mock, and/or to create a tension filled horror comedy. Brian Taylor has created a film that is so unfocused, that it doesn't even know what time era it should mock. The opening credit sequence of the film was clearly an homage to 70's action credit sequence. However, the rest of the film did not match with the tone of the opening credits, and instead, Brian Taylor, chose an abhorrent route of parody of mocking modern day poorly-directed action films. The thing is, who is he to judge when the only things that he has created and produced in the last 10 years has been trashy disposable action films (COUGH *Ghost Rider* COUGH)

Not only does Taylor not know how to parody a genre in which he has previous experience working with, he just doesn't know how to execute said parody. Two great examples on how to do parody right are Hot Fuzz and Nirvanna The Band The Show. Both of these pieces of entertainment not only excel at there craftsman ship, but with each parody or mock that they make throughout the run time, each mock has both a narrative and artistic purpose to further develop the style and narrative of there pieces. With Mom and Dad, each mock done in the film is just plain lazy and does not serve as something of artistic value.

As for the film itself, it's absolute shit. As stated before, each element of what I despise in the genre that Brian Taylor attempted to mock is in full force here with not a single restraint. Nothing is visually pleasing. The script is absolutely filled with un-needed bullshit. Nearly everything in this film is incompetent. The sound design, the way the film was edited. It's just plain lazy and dull. The only positive that I could find from this mess, was Nicholas Cage's typical over the top performance. But even in that regard, he was only in the film for around 30 minutes max, which was a big disappointment.

Mom and Dad is a film that nearly fails in all regards. It fails at mocking it's own genre, and fails at making a competent motion picture. Dispose of this film immediately.

Rating: 2.5/10