Reviews
‘Mum & Dad’ Review: The Joy of Simplistic Brutality
One of the things that irks me most about ‘filmmakers’ using AI is one of the two typical answers they give: “it was low-budget,” or “it was to save time.” Look at the endless number of films made pre-2020 on next to nothing that still managed to be impactful. When I watch that awful Coca-Cola ad, all I can think is, if they care so little about how their product is perceived, do they think it’s a worthwhile product? If you’re a filmmaker and decide to use AI for any reason, generative or NOT, then you are not a filmmaker. A low-budget shlock flick like Mum & Dad has more artistry in a single frame than the entirety of Elon Musk’s gooner creator on Twitter. While I may not have liked Mum & Dad, I can’t help but think of a simpler time when filmmakers cared about the craft and audiences didn’t have to overanalyze every single image just to see if the latest V/H/S film uses generative AI.
But I digress.
Mum & Dad: A Bleak, Brutal British Horror
Mum & Dad follows Lena (Olga Fedori), a young Polish woman working as a janitor at Heathrow airport. Lena quickly makes friends with her coworker Birdie (Ainsley Howard). Birdie, along with her mute brother Elbie (Toby Alexander), offers Lena a ride home from their father after Lena misses her bus. Graciously accepting, Lena joins them on a seemingly normal walk home. That is, until they get there and Lena meets her new Mum (Dido Miles) and Dad (Perry Benson).
When it comes to reviewing films, I usually know exactly what I want to say about them. But I had to sit with this film for about 24 hours before getting my thoughts together. At first, Mum & Dad felt like nothing more than mid-aughts misery porn. The world was hurting, yes, even the UK, and tensions around the globe were flaring. So, I rewatched the film. Yes, it was brutal, intense, and mean. And, to my surprise, less gory than I remembered. How could I have completely misremembered what I had watched not even a day before? Why did I think I sat through an hour and a half of buckets of blood?
Steven Sheil’s Shoestring Filmmaking Packs a Punch in Mum & Dad
Writer/director Steven Sheil’s debut feature film packs quite the punch (pun not intended) and leaves a visceral hole of misremembering. I constantly drone on about how filmmakers who make short films have one of the hardest jobs in film. For some reason, I always seem to forget to include independent filmmakers in that grouping. Sheil does better with a shoestring budget than Damien Leone does with millions. That is telling a brutal story of pain and suffering, full of grotesqueries, with actual meaning. But hey, in his own words, he was just making a “silly clown movie!”
I’m digressing again.
The characters of Mum and Dad are interesting amalgamations of ‘G’reat serial killers, but closely resemble Fred and Rose West. There isn’t much to them, which, to me, makes them even scarier. On the surface, Mum and Dad are normal people, with friends and a life. Dad has a job and is able to separate his personal and professional life. Like a film to follow just one year later, The Loved Ones, the normal nature of the antagonists makes them even more frightening. How many times have you gone to the grocery store, or to the bank, or signed up for home insurance without thinking twice about the worker you’re interacting with? They could easily have a young Polish girl chained up in their basement.
A Simple Story Elevated by Smart Storytelling
Mum & Dad’s story is incredibly simple. Foreign girl gets kidnapped by backwater yokels, gets tortured, then tries to escape. Sheil doesn’t do anything to expand on the story’s simplicity. Where Sheil succeeds is in his insistence on letting the audience put the pieces together. One of the reasons I thought this film was gorier than it actually was lies in its careful, precise visual storytelling. The blocking warps the mind into thinking they saw X happen, when actually, you hear X happening, see the reactions, and get a glimpse of the aftermath. And that’s where my main point from the intro comes into play.
Rather than attempting to step out of the lane of what could be, Sheil understood the film’s financial limits. Like how Bruce malfunctioned so much during the filming of Jaws, and it inadvertently made the film better. You can see the person pretending to be a decapitated head, squirming around under the table when the camera lingers a bit too much. Many of the scenes of violence look hastily rehearsed and shot, which adds a level of authenticity. It’s easy to see how slapdash this film is put together…and that’s why it had such an impact. Because it was made by people who WANTED to make something.
Why Authentic Filmmaking Still Matters
Care and craft go a long way with audiences. Even though the acting was pretty flat, the dialogue feels very first-draft-y, and the decapitated head moves more than a decapitated head usually does, you can feel the craft behind this film. It’s not some prompt written by a right-wing basement dweller who wants to make Greta Thunberg look like a walrus; it’s not three-time loser Jack Ciattarelli making an AI attack ad about Mikie Sherrill. Despite its flaws, Mum & Dad finds a unique way to make you think it’s gnarlier than it actually is, and that’s something you don’t get too much of these days.
There are countless subgenres within subgenres for horror, and one that feels underutilized is workplace horror. Unless you’re one of the lucky few, most people wake up at some point during the day, go to work, and then come home. It’s one of the few things in life that’s nearly unavoidable. While there are countless real-life examples of workplace violence, seeing exaggerated forms of it in film can still be fun. When I pitched covering The Belko Experiment for this month, I actually thought I was pitching Joe Lynch’s Mayhem. I soon found out how incorrect I had been, but figured I’d go along with it anyway.
Mike Milch (John Gallagher Jr.) and 79 of his coworkers are locked inside the towering building they come to work in every day in Bogotá, Colombia. They’re given simple instructions: murder two coworkers within the next half hour. When they fail that task, coworkers’ heads start blowing up left and right. When they’re given the next task, kill 30 people in two hours, they take it…a little more seriously.
The Belko Experiment’s Brutal Premise Sets Up High Stakes
Written by James Gunn and directed by Wolf Creek creator Greg McLean, The Belko Experiment is a painfully by-the-numbers film that offers little more than a handful of entertaining kills. Its futile attempts at commentary regarding work/life balance or just how bad “faceless” upper management is fall so flat it’s comical. Nothing like multi-millionaire James Gunn telling me how awful it is to have to work a real job for a living. Great work. And its one-dimensional characters do little more than create a slight sigh of relief when they’re dispatched without regard.
A singular attempt at cleverness is broached from the beginning when we see a colony of ants in an ant farm on someone’s desk. Oh, look at that, these workers are nothing more than mindless ants! But any attempt at following that slightly clever idea is quickly thrown away. At one point, Barry Norris (Tony Goldwyn), the big boss in the office, attempts to group up who should and shouldn’t be killed; who has the most value outside of work. Gunn had the perfect opportunity to make Barry a deep and more sinister antagonist. If Barry had grouped people into sets from most to least profitable for the company, we would have something. It would show that Barry is a forward-thinking villain who is trying to suck up to the people who get paid even MORE than him!
Missed Opportunities for a Smarter Corporate Villain
I’ll do you one better. After all of that, what if the bad guys that Barry recruited to help him cull his subordinates realized they were just pawns in the game of Big Business? So then they attempt to repent by killing Barry in the hopes that they can find a common means of escape from this hell? Why is there zero attempt at making an interesting story other than this shitty, watered-down Battle Royale with people we don’t give a shit about? Instead of anything interesting, we’re just given a group of baddies who try to get into the security office’s gun safe. The only reason we’re slightly scared of the “bad guys” is because they’re bad guys.
The only slightly interesting performances we get are from David Dastmalchian and Adria Arjona, even if it might be a fluke. As someone who is a fan of Greg McLean and the Wolf Creek series, something just felt disconnected about nearly every aspect of The Belko Experiment. I’ve brought it up before that sometimes it’s okay to have a film that doesn’t tell a great story as long as the kills can carry some of the weight. But to say this film has a story is laughable, and that carries over to how flat this film looks.
Skip The Belko Experiment and Watch Mayhem Instead
It’s weird how sour this film left me. When I was watching it, I found myself grimacing at some of the kills. And I didn’t vehemently dislike it as much as this review would suggest. But as I sat there and thought longer, I just couldn’t wrap my head around what anyone sees in this. Mayhem is an all-around better film that tackles this same subject but in a much better way. So if you ever decide to sit down and watch The Belko Experiment, maybe go watch Mayhem on Shudder instead.
Would it be a month of coverage on Horror Press if I didn’t bring up at least one aughts film? I know the curator of all things Horror Press, James-Michael, is shaking his fists at the sky and cursing the fact that he approved me covering The Hitcher. Of all the remakes that were so pervasive throughout the aughts, The Hitcher is one that slipped completely under my radar. And that’s a damn shame. It wouldn’t be until I found a DVD copy at Bookoff that I finally got the opportunity to watch it. Hot damn, the critics really got it wrong here.
The Hitcher: A Road Trip Turned Nightmare
Jim Halsey (Zachary Knighton) and his girlfriend Grace Andrews (Sophia Bush) are on a road trip to Lake Havasu in Jim’s gorgeous Oldsmobile 442. An unfortunate run-in with a mysterious hitchhiker, John Ryder (Sean Bean), Jim and Grace find themselves in a fight for life and death. Only, John isn’t their only concern. With the 5-0 hot on their tails, Jim and Grace must escape from a psychopathic man with a death wish and the hot-tempered, hot-faced Lieutenant Esteridge (Neal McDonough). As the odometer grows, so does the body count.
The Hitcher is one of those remakes that does not have the approval of the original’s lead, Rutger Hauer. Which is astounding to me. Sure, the original is good. But it doesn’t set itself apart from the crowd too much. Rutger Hauer’s John is slightly more reserved, and while he has an edge to him, I don’t necessarily find him overly menacing. (Don’t kill me.) Sean Bean’s John Ryder, on the other hand, is furiously terrifying. There’s no question that there are tons of issues with the Platinum Dunes remake, though, for me, the pros significantly outweigh the cons.
Jim Halsey Falls Flat
The biggest issue is the character of Jim Halsey. I love how the roles of Jim and Grace are swapped from the original film. It brings an updated, modern edge to the film and is a great way to throw audiences who have seen the original. Though I can imagine the hyper-masculine fans of the original were not too happy with that. When it was decided to swap the roles of the characters, it seems like any character depth for Jim was thrown out of the window. I think Zachary Knighton is a wonderful actor who does the best with what he has, but he doesn’t have enough to work with. Writers Eric Red, Jake Wade Wall, and Eric Bernt updated the film with tons of epic scenarios and moments, while seemingly forgetting to make the supposed lead of the film interesting.
On top of cardboard Jim, the inciting police incident just feels very forced. Grace runs into a diner, covered in blood, after she and Jim found a family butchered by John. Someone from the diner calls the police, which leads to Jim and Grace being arrested and charged with murder. Whether or not that’s supposed to be commentary on rural police doesn’t matter because it completely fails to do anything other than forcibly push the story forward.
Besides that? I hate to say, but I don’t have many issues with The Hitcher.
Soundtrack and Atmosphere: A High-Octane Experience
First and foremost, The Hitcher’s soundtrack is incredible. We start the film with Move Along by The All-American Rejects. Talk about a shot of adrenaline. And the greatest needle drop in all of aughts horror history is Nine Inch Nails’s Closer during the film’s most wild car chase. It’s hard not to get lost in this film when the music kicks in.
What really sells this film is how intensely they handle the violence and the film’s gorgeous chase scenes. It’s no Death Proof, but these scenes are miles above the Fast movies that were out at this time. In a day and age where chase scenes are overly produced, badly edited, and just plain boring, The Hitcher manages to infuse horror and action in a way that probably won’t be seen again. Watching films like The Hitcher makes me sad for the state of modern cinema. The Hitcher wasn’t made to win scores of Oscars; it was made by people passionate about telling a badass, harrowing story (minus Jim). And they greatly excel at that.
The Hitcher Is a Misunderstood Cult Favorite
The Hitcher falls in line with my running theory of post-9/11 ultra violence. We were a nation scared of what happened, what was happening, and what seemed to be on the horizon–The Hitcher bottles that fear and anger, packaging it into a nasty piece of genre. Sean Bean and Sophia Bush are an on-screen match made in heaven. They wade through harsh lighting, thick film grain, and buckets of blood to deliver a film that critics and audiences unfairly panned. While audiences may have moved along, I sure didn’t. I want to exist in a world of nothing but aughts genre films, but am forced to live in a world of elevated horror. Le sigh.
