Parents (1989)

(On Cable TV, September 2022) If you read a lot of my horror movie reviews, you will definitely get the sense that I loathe slasher films. But as it turns out, there are quite a few more categories to include in my “horror genre I dislike” marathon, and one of them has to be cannibalistic horror. Most of them have the added disadvantage of being flat-out terrible and with ultra-gory effects (a third “hated horror” category) but Parents isn’t like that—even if I still don’t like it. Being discriminate in its killings, much of the film is a suspense thriller from the perspective of a ten-year-old boy who begins to suspect, after a move from the East Coast to California, that his parents may be cannibals. (Body parts hanging on a meat hook in the basement aren’t the most subtle home decoration choice.)  His paranoia is justified, though, and the film’s big brutal kill happens at the right moment for him to burn the house down, which may not resolve the problem. Parents is supposed to be a comedy and occasionally attempts to be, but with material like that it’s difficult to see just where the comedy (even if black) would fit with boyish suburban cannibalistic paranoia. Eating Raoul it isn’t, and it’s easy to compare the urban snarkiness of that better film with the unfocused nature of this one. Most surprising, perhaps, is how the film was directed by Bob Balaban, an actor whose screen persona doesn’t really match this material. (His second directorial effort was a zombie film, so go figure.)  There are, to be sure, some mildly effective visual moments along the way—but the end result is mean, disturbing and repulsive, without much of a payoff. Parents, in other words, is definitely not changing my opinion on cannibal horror movies.