The good folks who descend upon the IFI for the annual Horrorthon are not noted for squeamishness, nail-biting or attempts to duck behind the seating. So when one of the hardcore faithful fainted dead away during Mum And Dad, it was big news among those who believe in the healing power of gore. This is the Horrorthon we’re talking about, a pow-wow of learned individuals who own perfectly respectably disgusting X-rated collections of Italian Giallo and Japanese Pinku eiga movies. Nobody wandered in hoping to see The Care Bears Go Picnic.
Consider yourself warned: even the strong of heart and stomach are advised to be very afraid of Mum And Dad, where writer-director Steven Sheil’s knack for shooting inappropriately used knitting needles is consistently heightened by certain uncanny similarities between the film’s eponymous villains and Fred and Rosemary West.
Like many tragic young women who wound up under a Gloucester patio, our heroine Lena (Olga Fedori), is subjected to the vilest things the West clan ersatz can think of. A Polish immigrant with a cleaning job at Heathrow airport, her sordid ordeal begins when she accepts a lift from chatty, chirpy co-worker Birdy (Ainsley Howard).
Lena does not know that Birdy is part of the most scathingly satirical family unit since Leatherface sat down to dinner in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, though she quickly finds out in some painful style.
Mum (Dido Miles), the sort of hostess who coos over her visitors while whipping them, soon turns out to be infinitely preferable to monstrous dad (Perry Benson). “Just don’t get him excited, dear,” goes the chilling family motto.
Scored through with twisted humour and inventive blood work, Mum And Dad deserves more than the unlovely moniker ‘torture porn’. Still, there’s no denying that there’s a hell of a lot of torture here, much of it of a gleefully ‘pornographic’ variety.
Mr. Sheil gets away with it by playing for laughs. The hum of aircraft overhead and generally grotty surroundings may lend a kitchen sink naturalism, but everything here – even the terrible true life crimes buried in the screenplay – are swiftly, controversially shanghaied into the service of evil comedy.
And what an evil comedy. The wicked grotesquerie is pure The League of Gentlemen but even Royston Vasey never produced anything like the gasping horrors of Christmas with Mum And Dad, a sort of Monty Python versus Salo mash-up with tinsel and party hats.
Made for £100,000 pounds under a new micro budget initiative in the UK, it goes to show what you can do if your mind is just warped enough.