Parents [1989] Randy Quaid

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Parents (1989)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098068/

Parents is a 1989 horror-comedy film written by Christopher Hawthorne and directed by Bob Balaban. The film is about a suburban 50s boy living who suspects his parents of cannibalism. The film starred Randy Quaid, Mary Beth Hurt, Sandy Dennis, and Bryan Madorsky. Although the film is primarily in the horror genre (it can also be categorized as surrealistic horror, and the film has sometimes been compared to the work of David Lynch), it features many comic moments, including the use of sitcom-like music in its soundtrack, and has sometimes been categorized as a black comedy. The production of the film spared no expense in creating each detail, reproducing accurately the modern style of the 1950s, right down to the clothing, wallpaper and carpeting. It was filmed in Ontario. Its tagline is: Theres a new name for terror!.

Randy Quaid ... Nick Laemle
Mary Beth Hurt ... Lily Laemle
Sandy Dennis ... Millie Dew
Bryan Madorsky ... Michael Laemle
London Juno ... Sheila Zellner (as Juno Mills-Cockell)
Kathryn Grody ... Miss Baxter
Deborah Rush ... Mrs. Zellner
Graham Jarvis ... Mr. Zellner
Helen Carscallen ... Grandmother
Warren Van Evera ... Grandfather
Wayne Robson ... Lab Attendant
Uriel Byfield ... Little Boy
Mariah Balaban ... Little Girl
Larry Palef ... Announcer

Parents is a movie about the conviction that after the kids are in bed and their lights are out, parents engage in weird rituals and unthinkable practices. What about those roars of laughter that come echoing down the hallway from the living room, for example: Are the grown-ups just having a good time, or are they holding their nightly planning session on how to play tricks on kids? Parents takes place in the 1950s, an ideal decade for this material, and stars Bryan Madorsky as Michael, a solemn, owl-faced little boy whose life centers on one question: What are the leftovers left over from? Night after night, his parents place steaming shanks of meat, juicy red slabs of prime roast, on his plate. Where do they come from? Leftovers, his mom says. But then his mom and dad wink at each other over the table and share a secret laugh, and little Michael knows in his bones that there is something fundamentally wrong with the menu.

Because it speaks to a terror that lurks deep within our memories, Parents has the potential to be a great horror film. But it never knows quite what to do with its inspiration. Is it a satire, a black comedy, or just plain horror? The right note is never found, and so the movies scenes coexist uneasily with one another. There is, for example, the night that Michael creeps out of bed and discovers his parents engaged in some kind of bloody savage rite on the living room floor. How does that fit with the sessions Michael has with the school psychiatrist, who obviously is crazier than any of her clients? The director, Bob Balaban, has cast his movie well. Mary Beth Hurt plays the mom, a perky little thing with a 50s hairdo and clothes that come right out of the Simplicity pattern book. Shes always in the kitchen, doing things with enormous stainless steel knives. Dad is Randy Quaid, whose horn-rim glasses and business suits cannot disguise a certain predatory quality, especially when he leans over the table to skewer a big piece of roast beef. The look of the movie, and the feel of the familys split-level 50s modern house is all just right. But somehow theres no payoff.

Perhaps Balaban and his screenwriter, Christopher Hawthorne, should have declared themselves. Is this a horror movie? Or a psychological comedy about the secret fears of children? Some of the scenes stray so far into blood-soaked pathology that the others dont fit. The movie needs an organizing vision, a clear line through to the end, a feeling that the director is sure of the effect he wants to achieve. Satire of this sort is delicate, and Balaban has the same problem that Paul Bartel had in Eating Raoul, another comedy about cannibalism: The more a movie addresses itself to our secret terrors, the harder it has to work to be funny - because at some level, of course, it is attempting to convince us to eat our pet rabbits.

Parents was a decided oddity when it came out one that the studio clearly had no idea how to market. When the film did eventually come out, it never did much business. Parents was the directorial debut of Bob Balaban best known as an actor in films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Altered States (1980), 2010 (1984), Deconstructing Harry (1997) and as the film critic in Lady in the Water (2006), as well as most of Christopher Guests films. Balaban has also done a surprising amount of directing, including the flop zombie comedy My Boyfriends Back (1993) and most substantial dramatic work like The Last Good Time (1994), the anti-death penalty tv movie The Exonerated (2005), the acclaimed Bernard and Doris (2006) and the biopic Georgia OKeeffe (2009), although few of these have raised Balabans profile any more than his acting work has.
Parents was one of a spate of films that came out in the latter half of the 1980s and into the early 1990s offering a dark undercurrent to Family Values, showing either weird families or inverting family/suburban life with a dark malice. This was perhaps a response to the creation of the idea of traditional Family Values as a political ideal during the Ronald Reagan election campaigns at the start of the 1980s. Efforts among this included the likes of The Stepfather (1987), The Burbs (1989), Life on the Edge/Meet the Hollowheads (1989), Society (1989), The Addams Family (1991), Meet the Applegates (1991), while some of David Lynchs works such as Blue Velvet (1986) and tvs Twin Peaks (1990-1) also touch upon this territory Bob Balaban even has David Lynchs regular musician Angelo Badalamenti on board here conducting the score. Around this time, there also began tvs The Simpsons (1989 ), which was originally construed as an alternative to the wholesome family togetherness of the 1980s No 1 series The Cosby Show (1984-92).

Bob Balaban directs Parents as a hyper-real parody of 1950s normalcy where everything comes designed in giddy primary colours, the cars and clothes are period, the father plays golf, the mother hosts dinner parties where everybody sits around the table for a game of cards afterwards. Of course, Balaban plays everything with an exaggerated hyper-normalcy that arrives at a point of total weirdness, while lacing it with a darkly sinister undertow. You would swear that Parents is a film made by militant vegetarians all the meat that is served up at the dinner table comes with a disturbing ugliness and there are surreal dream sequences of people being strangled by sausages. Balaban punctuates the film with bizarre imagery hands crawling up out of the garbage disposal, refrigerators bleeding. He generates some threat during the scenes where young Bryan Madorsky hides under the table at father Randy Quaids work and sees him cut up a body where we left with the impression that Quaid is taking parts home for dinner and when Madorsky then drops the scissors under the table during dinner; or where Sandy Dennis comes to visit and a body falls out from above while she is rooting around in the cellar for a rat and then she is pushed into the pantry as someone starts stabbing at her through the door with a knife, and in the next scene meat is served up for dinner where we cannot be sure if it is her or not. Parents is like a paranoid childs view believing their parents are not who they are or are trying to kill them one kept being reminded of the fearfully exaggerated world of Invaders from Mars (1953).

On the minus side, Parents feels like it is all sinister lurking threat beneath the patina of hyper-exaggerated middle-class 1950s lifestyle this one gets clearly but it is also hard to work out what it is actually about as a film. It takes some 30 minutes or more of the running time to grasp what Bob Balaban is trying to do. The sinister threat never coalesces into anything clear. Nothing is explained why the family happen to be cannibals. All that one is left with in the end is a peculiar film with an uneven tone that varies between the cartoonish and sinister but never makes its mind up what it is trying to do as a film.