american dad porn: Review of Steven Sheil's MUM & DAD

Year: 2008
Release date: May 9th , 2009
Directors: Steven Sheil
Writers: Steven Sheil
IMDB: link
Trailer: link
Review by: Ben Austwick
Rating: 8 out of 10

The anonymous interzone of London's Heathrow airport and its surrounds is the setting for British horror movie Mum & Dad, a claustrophobic and intense film that follows a murderous middle-aged couple (based loosely on English serial killers Fred and Rosemarie West) who sell stolen cargo from the airport and take advantage of its transient population to fulfill their psychopathic desires. Despite being very much a part of the contemporary torture porn genre with its focus on drawn-out ordeal, Mum & Dad is unusual enough, and British enough, to stand out from the crowd.

It's Britishness is in its kitchen sink style, borrowed in part from modern directors like Mike Leigh and Shane Meadows but a continuation of a rich heritage that goes back to the 1960s, coming across in part in its slow-paced, dialogue-heavy style, but more so in its accurate and studied portrayal of people and place. The heroine of the piece, Lena, is a Polish immigrant working as a cleaner at the airport; the titular "mum and dad" working-class Londoners; the world around them the poor but unexciting suburban hinterland that serves Heathrow airport. Perry Benson as Dad is particularly well observed, a sullen, repulsive, middle-aged wheeler-dealer with an amorality that seeps over from the usual petty criminality into something much worse.

As horror movie psychopaths go, he is particularly unpleasant. Mum & Dad is brave enough to present his violence as sexual – a universal trait in real life mass murderers that is prudishly tip-toed around in most horror films – the most cringe-worthy and hide-your-eyes sequences generally involving his warped lust. A great scene sees the family sat around the breakfast table while a hardcore porn film plays on the kitchen TV, a nod at the weird household of the aforementioned real-life Gloucester serial killers Fred and Rose West.

It's this sort of slow burning nastiness that infuses Mum & Dad, a creepy torture of masturbation, binding and cutting that while decidedly unpleasant never explodes into the all-out violence we've come to expect from the genre.

This is a mixed blessing. While more intelligent and true to the kitchen sink traditions of British cinema, Mum & Dad doesn't really deliver any shocks or scares. The grim, relentless monotony of its horror never peaks, and indeed fizzles out in a straightforward ending that is particularly disappointing given the film's left field credentials. It seems that director Steven Sheil painted himself into a corner in trying to marry the diverse arthouse British and exploitation American traditions he has drawn on and, in the end, couldn't find a way out.

But Mum & Dad should be viewed as part of the latter, the exploitation genre, and in particular the modern torture porn offshoot it so obviously is part of. As such it is a welcome change from the suspend your disbelief, teenagers in peril cliché we so unquestionably swallow to get our shocks and gore. In ten or twenty years time when Mum & Dad is viewed as part of this peculiar moment in horror cinema, it will certainly stand out from the rest.



Source: quietearth.us