Mom and Dad is a ridiculous, campy horror-comedy starring Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair with a premise that it stretches to the absolute max.
Mom and Dad comes on the heels of a line of highly successful horror movies about the anxiety of parenthood—mainly The Babadook, A Quiet Place, and Hereditary. While each of those examples is elevated arthouse movies, Mom and Dad comes on almost the complete opposite side—exploitation. Even though the boiled down logline is basically that parents suddenly have the urge to violently murder their children, it is a surprisingly self-aware movie. Director Brian Taylor knows exactly what kind of movie he’s making. The movie only goes astray when it thinks it’s about something deeper—maybe it is—but it isn’t much more than some good genre thrills, except for one central scene.
That central scene comes nearly two-thirds of the way through the movie and delivers the idea that the movie is trying to put forward in a neat package beautifully delivered by Selma Blair, who plays the titular Mom, Kendall. After her husband, Brent (Nicolas Cage giving the exact performance you’d think he’d give) has a meltdown in the basement of their picturesque suburban house screaming about his dreams that were lost to parenthood, Kendall calmly sits down beside him and with a tear-streaked face assures him that this isn’t the life she pictured for herself either. It’s a surprisingly powerful scene that comes amid the carnage of the first two-thirds of the film and would have more impact if Taylor was able to complete an idea. Instead, the movie switches back to being the B-movie that audiences are expecting to see.
There’s not much to explain in the plot of Mom and Dad. The logline that I mentioned earlier really covers most of the plot. Kendall and Brent’s High School sophomore daughter Carly (Anne Winters) is almost too stereotypical—which is nearly perfect for this movie. While being driven to school by her Mom, she idly scrolls through Instagram while her mom complains that they don’t speak anymore. Carly sharply responds that it’s because Kendall doesn’t have a life. It’s over-the-top, but not far off from the reality of Mother/Daughter relationships. Brent, a typical suburban husband—too much machismo, vaguely racist, etc.—disapproves of Carly’s boyfriend Riley (Robert T. Cunningham) who happens to be black, though Brent says that he doesn’t like him because he’s a year older than her.
All this setup is to establish that the parents and kids—the other being Carly’s younger brother Josh (Zackary Arthur)—have a strained relationship. Still, even if it’s over the top, it seemingly is nothing worse than any other parent’s relationship with their kids. That is until we see other parents gathering outside the gates of Carly’s school stalking their kids with nothing but malice in their eyes. Visually, it feels like a clear homage to George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead while the concept feels like it’s lifted from The Crazies. Eventually, the parents begin to scale the fence to the school and chase down their kids like lions hunting.
From there, Mom and Dad turns into a nonstop ridiculous and violent B-movie of parents trying to murder their children. To the movie’s credit—and detriment—it knows what it is. At just 83 minutes, it’s for the most part able to maintain its ridiculous premise. Selma Blair is phenomenal as she tries to fight the urge to both protect and potentially maim her children. Cage’s character, on the other hand, is almost too eager to join the legion of parents taking baseball bats and hammers to their kids. His career has been one odd choice after another, but Mom and Dad does the exact thing you need to do with Nicolas Cage: let him go crazy.
There’s not much more to the movie. You could probably watch it with one eye on the screen and still get everything you need to get out of it. It’s half-baked at best in terms of plot and character and doesn’t amount to much more than a B-movie with an interesting premise. That being said Blair and Cage are giving legitimately good performances and the movie as a whole is, for the most part, what you want it to be. Turn off the lights, gather up some friends, pop some popcorn, and laugh both at and with the movie. You’ll have an ideal movie night.
Mom and Dad is now streaming on Hulu. It is also available on Amazon ➤
★★½ out of five
Hey, I'm Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven't yet seen represented. I'm also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.