Meet the "PARENTS": A Hallucinogenic Head-Trip into Cannibalism and Conformity

I'm really pleased to be talking about this one today, for a few reasons.

1. Unlike some of my other subjects this film doesn't even have much of a cult following. In fact, in comparison to even a film like C.H.U.D. which had 50some pictures for me to scavenge off IMDb, and some factoids to raid for fun supplemental content, Parents has only 13 pics, three or four trivia factoids, and just three quotes. Not a lot of folks are obsessing over this flick and they honestly have missed a trick.
2. The "Suburbia is Hell" sub-genre of horror is a really fun one that doesn't get enough love, and I was reminded of this movie with another entry coming soon to...somewhere, probably not theaters... the eerie-looking Vivarium with Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots (fun saide-fact, I once had an entire conversation with someone about how they thought her name sounds made up and ridiculous, and my response was to quote Infinity War a few years early with "But all names are made up...")
3. Most of the "Suburbia is Hell" set, like the Joe Dante classic The 'Burbs, The Stepford Wives, or the "Lassie-but-with-zombies" farce Fido, augment their premise by also injecting a fair amount of comedy and satire, and Parents isn't too different on that score except that it's jokes all land in the same discomfiting way: like someone who makes a really offensive, misogynist,  racist, or otherwise "edgy" joke and say they're just kidding... but something going on behind their eyes makes you suspect they aren't joking... they might just mean it. The humor of Parents isn't funny. It's dark comedy the same jet-black shade as very old dried blood. It's predatory, and that dissonance makes the suspense that underlays it all palpable.  

I: HEY THERE SPORT...

But first- We MAMBO!

I want to talk about Perez Prado for a second. Then we'll get back to the movie. Perez Prado was a Cuban born band-leader who became famous in the 1940's as "The King of the Mambo". He and his orchestra topped charts in the UK and the US with hits like "Mambo No.5" and "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White". He is largely credited as bringing Latin music to a forefront of popularity in America during this time period, his sound becoming synonymous with the period and evocative of that other 50's cultural juggernaut "I Love Lucy", paving the way for success of other artists in this field like (of course) Desi Arnaz and similar artists with that big Caribbean style like Harry Belafonte (and if you don't know who that is, but have seen Beetlejuice? one word: DAAY-O!) And because this music was initially popular in the 40s, by the time the young folks who loved it then became the progenitors of the Baby Boom, this was the music the parents of the Boomers listened to. So it's what our main characters listen to, and big band stuff like his is what fills in for a proper score most of the time, incidental music mostly being ominous hushed tones to amplify suspense.

Anyway, Prado led his orchestra for decades, all the way up to his death in 1989...the same year this movie came out. Do I think Parents killed Perez Prado? No. But it does begin with a strangely disharmonious rendition of his signature hit "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White" while a mint-condition Oldsmobile prowls it's way through the suburbs of 1950-whenever carrying our three chief characters this narrative revolves around: Mom (Mary Beth Hurt), Dad (Randy "Shitter was full! MERRY CHRISTMAS!" Quaid), and little Micheal Laemle (Brian Madorsky). And the strange irony of a child being raised by serial killers being introduced by the music of a man who died around the same time the film was made was something that struck me as interesting while prepping this dissection.

And make no mistake, while the film itself plays coy for a little while as to what the titular parental units are about, the official synopsis and any discussion of this flick DOES NOT, so the fun becomes just watching this weirdness unfold knowing it, and watching Micheal be consumed in a more metaphorical fashion by the creeping certainty that these two are up to something...

Because these two...they're something else. We meet them more directly while they are talking at the dinner table while Micheal plays in the foreground. I say plays, but it's not like the kid is having fun. In fact, one of the hallmarks of this kid's performance is how perfectly he captures the dead-eyed hollow look of a victim of ongoing trauma.

This framed  picture shows up in Mom and Dads bedroom at one point,
and captures the emotional landscape of little Mikey perfectly.

While Micheal 'plays', his parents 'chat'. But the chat quickly becomes a nuzzling bit of barely restrained snogging, which, when noticed they're being watched just gets a cheerful "Bed time!" from our dear old Dad.
Looks like somebody is tired of having an only child...

This leads to a conversation between Micheal and Dad about his son's fear of the dark and his troubling streak of nightmares. Dad seems all gentle paternal authority in demeanor, but in actual content his advice is deeply unsettling, warning the darkest place you can't get away from is...then points at his head.

The More You Know...
the more likely Randy Quaid will have to eat you.

And this sets up the unspoken dynamic between Dad and Son through the rest of the movie:

 "Be more like me, Son"

"But you fuckin' terrify me, Dad"

After that we get a deep dive into his nightmares, literally, as the transition from waking to dream is done with a brilliant visual trick. As Micheal takes off his pajama top, revealing an emaciated frame that makes him look more like a little old man than a 10 year old (because you see, on top of everything else, he never eats his meat! How's he s'posed to get any pudding if he won't eat his meat?), he performs a maneuver anyone who's ever been a scared little kid (so, y'know all of you) is familiar with: the running leap into bed to avoid the monsters. But as soon as he hits the sheets, the sheet collapses under him and he plummets into a bottomless pool of candy-apple red blood. It's a great introduction to the hypnotic and surreal nightmare sequences that occur almost at random throughout the narrative. One of the elements about the nightmare subplot I really enjoyed is that because they start and stop so unpredictably, we as the audience begin to question what is real and what is the fevered imagination of Micheal Laemle and that means we're taken off guard the moment we realize that something horrible happening midway through the film ISN'T a dream.

Sidenote: My mom has the same cookbook as the Mom
in this movie and spotting it made my stomach physically
lurch when I first saw this flick. 

And the specter of something horrible happening hangs over every second of this movie. The main reason for this? The performances of our parents.

II: HOW'S IT GOIN', SLUGGER?

The acting in this movie is off the charts creepy. I feel like the director gave a very simple instruction: "Pretend everything is fine, but that you're always about 5 seconds from hurting this kid."
Quaid's performance is all watchful glares, slow smiles, and unsettling advice. He's the picture of 50's suburban conformity, every part of his and his wife's image tailored to be stylish, up to the minute, and above all: invisible. He even waxes poetic on this during a scene when he spots his little boy watching him warily and decides to make it a teachable moment. While fryin' up a kidney, he goes on about how conforming, being how people expect you to be, and keeping watchful of others is "the next best thing to being invisible". Which is of course how the Laemles thrive and survive.

(Side note I didn't know where else to put, the name Laemle is a reference to former Universal head honcho Carl Laemle, who helmed the studio through the first great horror boom of cinema, the age of Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and my personal favorites Bride of Frankenstein and The Wolf Man.)

Mom is just as subtly unnerving, constantly trying to get her son to eat more, but always with a focus on meat. But she's never clear what kind...One of the signature moments of the film is a discussion of what they're having, to which his parents simply reply, "Left-overs." What were they before they were left-overs? A knowing glance to one another precedes one of Quaid's slow smiles, then: "Left-overs-to-be..." Mary Beth Hurt brings a strange mixture of the same barely restrained violence as her husband, but she obviously favors her son more than Dad does, having more honest moments of care and compassion with him, however fleeting. But the most upsetting parts of her perfect home-maker performance is her smile and her laughter. The real Mom is a quiet, wary soul much like her son, and her life revolves almost entirely around cooking up different cuts of prime people. But when entertaining or socializing with other adults, her laughs are a little too loud, her smile never quite touches her eyes... and in that subtlety she actually outshines Quaid by quite a bit in my estimation.

Several times Randy's more authoritarian delivery of certain lines and the over-all coldness of his body language, plus his slicked, immobile hair style, put me in mind of Lt. Cmdr. Data himself, Brent Spiner. And personally I would have loved to see the man that brought such sneering villainy to Lore take a crack at this part and see him flex himself so far outside of the main role he is known for.

I haven't really talked much about child actors on this blog, and Brian Madorsky is mostly known for just this film. He's not a bad child actor, as I noted before he plays the trauma of his life very well. You can count on one hand how many times in the narrative he smiles. But in the scheme of it overall, we don't know  much about him. He's a cypher, mainly meant to be our pint-size vantage point onto the suspenseful interplay of his parents and the rest of the world. But this is where the direction shines, placing Micheal low in frames, showing us his lens into the world, the way he filters information with a child's characteristic lack of understanding of sex, violence, adult customs, and...life, really. He's so insulated from normal that some of the moments where he does shine are when he interacts with normal people and they are struck by what a morbid mind he seems to have.
During his first day at school he tells the teacher (and his entire class) when asked to tell them "something new" about an old folk ritual that involves skinning a cat, boiling off the bones, then sucking out the marrow to become invisible. The teacher of course recoils at this, but keeps her cool. This does however set off the two other major threads of the supporting cast: Millie Dew, and Sophie Zellner played with puckish charm by Juno Mills (she's from the moon).

This kid's eyes do more work than some whole actors do in their entire career.

Sophie is a fellow new kid, with problems of her own. Her father works with Micheal's father at the chemical company TOXICO (a rather on-the-nose bit of symbolism for pretty much every relationship in this movie) making industrial grade defoliants. That Dad's distaste overall for plant matter even extends to his job makes me smile a little, nothing like keeping to an aesthetic, huh Randy?

Anyway, she thinks his story about dead cats was neat. See, Sophie's got some behavioral issues that resulted in her being held back a year. This also has the result of her being a whole foot taller than her new friend Micheal, but there's a nice bit of blocking in their first interaction: as they walk out of school, and she begins spinning a yarn about how she moved here from the Moon, not Vermont, Micheal is staring up at her not sure if he should be incredulous or bemused. As they continue to talk, and they decide they like each other, Micheal is walking up an inclined concrete retaining wall next to them. Once they're firmly established as friends, they're around equal heights. It really highlights how the blocking and shot composition of this movie works really well to establish something that might not be immediately obvious from the strange, obtuse dialog real children often have.

Looking around online, I couldn't find a screencap of that shot,
 or really any pictures of Sophie and Micheal beyond this one so it'll have to do.

There are scenes where Sophie reveals she understands a bit more about the adult world than Micheal does, but she mostly uses this knowledge for mischief. And this is mostly because her parents are boozy and neglectful (despite their similarly strait-laced appearance to Mom and Dad Laemle), almost never appearing in the same scene together and only sharing one line of dialog with their daughter. When Micheal compliments her on that her Mom is really nice, Sophie scoffs saying that she always treats other kids nice, but not her. Micheal just sulks in response. At least her mom doesn't eat people, right bud?

"Seriously, the Thompsons AGAIN?"

And then there's Millie Dew, a social worker called by Micheal's teacher after one too many moments of morbid behavior from her new student start setting off alarm bells. Millie (Sandy Howard)  is one of the best portrayals in an already solid cast, doing a lot with a little and really selling her character as a first-wave feminist liberated and educated woman, through the way she chain-smokes in a public school, dresses in a manner I can only describe as 'eccentrically frumpy', and acts clumsy to put people off guard, then follows up with incisive questions. A scene she shares with Mom really draws in on the eventual face-off these two will experience later, with Ms. Dew trying to pin her down. My favorite line from Mom comes in this scene, when asked to describe her son: "Well, he's not much of an eater..." Once again, everything in her life revolves around her hellish version of the domestic, and it's another one of those funny-but-not-really moments.

Millie Dew, pictured realizing she might have just fucked up later on in the movie.

III: KIDS! WHO MADE THE LITTLE BASTARDS?!

So one of the reason I think this flick works so well based mostly on performances is the director himself, Bob Balaban. When I looked him up I had a moment of "Oh, THAT guy!" That's right, he's mostly an actor, with a majority of his directorial work being in television.(including an episode of "Tales from the Darkside", the similarly suburban horror comedy My Boyfriend's Back, and few episodes of the surreal suburban supernatural show "Eerie, Indiana", so honestly I think maybe he was working through some stuff concerning this subject matter for a while...) I also think that this is one of those cases where the director is an actor as well and thus really knows how to tease just the right performances out of his cast. Not to say his chops as a technical director aren't spectacular too, I've already complimented his blocking and how it enhances the story. But his master-stroke is a memorable scene with Ms. Dew in the Laemle house where she stumbles onto something shocking and her scream literally travels through the house, down vents, hallways, and finally up the chimney, all in one solid shot.

He also perfectly captures lots of the little, timeless things about being a kid in any era. Making friends, the giddy joy of doing something you're not allowed to, and the esoteric thrill of overhearing adults having conversations you shouldn't be listening to and don't really understand- but feel like secret messages from another universe itching to be deciphered.

"Seriously, how do you even have a party with keys?"

And that creeping sense of menace I mentioned just keeps building as it becomes clearer and clearer to Micheal that his parents are into some pretty sick shit and they won't rest until he's onboard too. Quaid really ratchets up the subtle crazy, being the man of the house becoming more stressful for him as he realizes he's not getting through to his kid.
 A scene of him disciplining Micheal gets a little too real, when his wife chides him that "This isn't the way. You're scaring him."
"Yeah? Well, Mister you scare me too. You don't look like me. You don't act like me..." 

Being a kid who experienced a lot of tension due to how different I and my own father were, that scene genuinely rattles me. Eventually, the only time Dad seems happy is when he's out at the grill, warming up some more leftovers...

Nothing to see here, just a man and his meat...

And of course as we discover more about how Dad operates, quietly doing his job and then sneaking down to where his company keeps medical cadavers for research, sometimes even delegating to unwitting assistants to save him some prime cuts, Micheal can't deny the truth any longer and we creep in on the moment of truth, executed in a fabulously disorienting sequence of the family at the table while the house slowly spins around them and the Laemles face the facts of life.

I also love the inversion of the "Now eat your vegetables," parental edicts in a family of cannibals.
And this little dude's face just screams "Okay, Boomer..." despite the fact he, y'know...IS one, technically.

The disdain the Dad has for his son, while his Mom holds out hope he'll come around ("Your son. The vegetarian..." he snarls, making it the worst possible slur he can) is the driving force behind the way the climax boils over in the last act of the movie. Eventually all the other satellite characters that have populated the second act simply drop away and the story returns to the nucleus of it's foundation: the nuclear family experiencing a macabre meltdown over the son's refusal to conform both outside and inside the home.

The story literally trims the fat for it's third act...

The only thing the movie loses as it adds on this momentum is the great, distinctive surrealism of it's nightmare scenes and the slow unpeeling of the layers of weirdness of the family are not as provocative once they're laid bare. Maybe three seasons of "Hannibal" and the overall works of Thomas Harris have left me a little jaded to just boring old vanilla cannibalism? But the climax feels a little rushed and not as cathartic as you'd hope, especially once it becomes clear our little hero has merely leapt from one frying pan into another fire.

But it still remains an overall big recommendation if you want to have a good time with a simple concept that is presented with style and a timeless flair for the heart of being a kid: everything is scary, nothing makes sense, and you're a little afraid of the day it will...

It's on Amazon Prime, just like yesterday's (and tomorrow's) selection!

So I'll leave you with my favorite of the surreal WTF moments of Parents, and if that doesn't convince you, nothing will:

If your first thought is "I've seen enough hentai to know where this is going..." then congratulations- you're one of my people. Poor bastards...


NEXT TIME: CALL ME SNAKE...