Mmm, leftovers. Another ’80s film mining the ’50s, but this one brought something a little different to the table.
By 1989, we’d had a decade of Reagan-era nostalgia trips back to Eisenhower’s America. Back to the Future, The Heavenly Kid, Peggy Sue Got Married – they all gave us versions of the ’50s we recognized from the Happy Days opening credits. It was a malt-shopped chromed-out time when everyone was a-rockin’ and rollin’ all week long. Parents took those rose coloured glasses off. Bob Balaban’s feature directorial debut sliced-up suburban conformity and presented it like a David Lynch-directed TV dinner commercial.
It arrived just as the ’80s were ending and some filmmakers were getting braver about picking at American mythology. Movies like Blue Velvet, and even Meet The Hollowheads and The Applegates were mercilessly skewering the suburbs, and Parents fit right into that moment in cinematic history – when horror and arthouse quirk were starting to overlap in interesting ways. These films made us question what we’d been nostalgic for all this time.
Nobody quite knew what to do with it at the time. It was too slow and subdued for the typical slash-and-splatter crowd, and too dark for the nostalgia crowd. But it found its people on video, we weirdos who rented Society and The Stepfather – and wanted a third movie to round out a marathon about nuclear family fallout.
This quirky slow-cooked casserole of childhood alienation and cannibalism is not for the delicate palate, but the discerning mystery meat lover will enjoy chewing on its gristly morsels.
If you’re looking for some awkward dinner conversation, just pull up a chair and uncork the Chianti.
Bon appétit. -Pop