Dear readers, though my own parents shed their physical forms some time ago, I can still vividly recall the many happy days I had with them in my youth -- the byzantine rules of decorum at mealtimes, crawling through the passages of our furnace in my best “brush suit” as their faces peered at me from the vents. And the silences, oh, the silences! If I ever, even for a moment, sensed they meant me any sort of harm it might have had quite the scarring effect.

Threatening parents are relatively scarce in horror, a genre that is positively overflowing with eerie offspring. The few films that do venture into this disturbing territory are rarely about a birth parent, focusing instead on ill-intentioned adopters and lubricous flesh monsters posing as a generous foster families (*). The makers of Mom and Dad have remedied this thematic dearth with a film that takes the notion of murderous parents to Romero-esque proportions. 

A creeping wave of targeted homicidal impulses slips its way across the populous. Adults are suddenly shedding their nurturing instincts, butchering their progeny and returning to their lives as though nothing unusual has transpired. This variety of contagious insanity is particularly inconvenient for Ryan children, Carly (Anne Winters) and Josh (Zackary Arthur), as their father is Nicolas Cage, a man who has a considerable head start on insanity. The Ryan children are forced to spend the night fending off a barrage of attacks from their parents, fighting for survival against the very duo that gave them life.

Both mother (Selma Blair) and father Ryan put in lovely performances. Any moviegoer saddened by the slow erosion of Nicolas Cage’s mania will have much cause for celebration, rejoicing in the knowledge that this venerable absurdist is still in full possession of his faculties. It is more than heartening to see him dashing about the house, swinging wild and spouting lines with eccentric flair. His sledgehammer-wielding rendition of the “Hokey Pokey” is just the sort of thing to buck up any recently disillusioned fan of Mr. Cage’s earlier work. Selma Blair provides a necessary counterbalance to her whirlwind costar, portraying a villainess who doesn’t just go charging into every child killing with great enthusiasm and little premeditation. Ms. Blair’s even temper make her a frightening and unpredictable foe and her deadpans buoy much of the black humor that the film’s author rendered so lovingly. 

The author in question is Brian Taylor, an unsurprising source of well-calibrated lunacy. Mr. Taylor is responsible for the Crank series, a wonderfully manic pair of tales about a man who will literally die if he does not perform such daring acts as public fornication and self-electrocution. Mr. Taylor transports his aesthetic tendencies from action to horror without omitting any of the buoyancy he brought to his previous efforts, ending Mom and Dad with the same stormy brevity that he utilized so successfully in ventures past. One can only hope that every genre will eventually benefit from his lively voice.

Mom and Dad runs 83 minutes and is rated R for disturbing horror, violence, language throughout, some sexual content, nudity and teen drug use.

(*) P.G. assumes everyone has seen Society (1989), which can make for awkward conversation when we are out in society - Penny Dee, Ed.