Director: Steven Sheil
Writer: Steven Sheil
Release year: 2008
Planes, sickening torture, and more planes…
The Polish Lena is quite fond of her new job as a cleaning lady at the airport and gets along nicely with her co-worker Birdie. A new-found friendship she’ll soon have to re-evaluate, as it will lead her to be abducted, chained to a bed and subject to endless torture and molestation. Lena has just been adopted by dear old Mum and Dad.
Mum & Dad is a uniquely bizarre but largely unsuccessful potpourri of stereotypical British comedy and the new inexplicably popular trend of torture horror. This is the questionable result you get when casting a traditional British sitcom actor like Perry Benson (You Rang, M’Lord and Blackadder) as a perverted and malevolent lunatic who, along with his hysterical wife, abducts youthful social outcasts and subjects them to sickening torture rituals in order to make them part of the family.
Mum and Dad live next to London Heathrow airport and the young employees of the cleaning company there, who are often runaways from home, prove to be easy targets for their demented parental cravings. 
Their last victim Lena (Olga Fedori), however, fights back with a bloody passion. Mum & Dad is horror obviously aimed at the most hardcore trained fanatics of gore and smut movies. This extremely low-budgeted production is literally chock-full of nauseating images of torture and gratuitous bits of deviance, but it tremendously falls flat in all the other and more fundamental departments. The plot is non-existent and debuting writer/director Steven Sheil doesn’t even make an attempt to build up suspense and/or an atmosphere of dread. The dialogs are downright imbecilic and, due to the explicit nature of the violence, the black comedy potential entirely misses its effect.
There’s almost no use of musical guidance and the number of sets and filming locations is extremely limited (although I read somewhere those were some of the newly founded production company’s strict conditions, whatever purpose that may serve). The overlong and monotonous torture footage quickly becomes boring and – worst of all – the director appears to have an odd fetish for airplanes. Every couple of minutes there’s a pointless interlude showing a plane randomly passing over the estate. That’s a whole lot of planes, I assure you!
Admittedly I had reasonably high hopes of Mum & Dad finally being an innovative and pleasantly eccentric type of torture horror movie, but unfortunately it’s nearly just as clichéd and derivative as all the rest. Presumably this movie is still slightly more interesting than watching Hostel 3 or Saw 6.
Rating: 
Trailer:
Post a comment on this article - (2) Posts
April 29th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Ouch, Cov, so harsh… Was it really that bad?
As you might remember, I saw the short version of the movie, which lasted about 45 minutes. The first half hour showed some promise, actually. I seem to remember actress Olga Fedori being quite convincing in her role as a tortured & desperate victim. I also liked the scene where she found the tooth near the washing machine, her sneaky attempts to use it as a way to draw attention to her and the consequences in which her fruitless efforts result. It looked like it could turn out to be a pretty good movie.
Then, for some inexplicable reason, I seem to have dozed off for about 40 minutes. I woke up again to the sound of Olga screaming and bashing skulls (or something…?). Before I knew what hit me, I saw the endcredits rolling.
From what I saw, I'd say the movie started off with being a 5/10 piece of work at least. Apparantly something went wrong along the way?
Oh, and regarding those terms of the production company you mentioned: Mum & Dad is part of a series of ten movies produced by London-based Microwave Productions. Their aim was to give local film-makers each a budget of 100.000£ to produce a feature film. So, obviously, the limited cast and locations were the result of that. Always a smart way of handling things, but you say Steven Sheil also managed to turn it into a bad film? Too bad…