Horror Extreme Movie Catalog

The opening scenes of this "dark comedy" feature great 1950s cars, decor, costumes, and musical score! Perky housewife "Mom" is a kitchen whiz who serves up tasty looking left-overs every night. White shirt-and-tie "Dad" is ravenous after putting in long days at Toxico. (Clever company name!) Little Michael just wants to make friends at his new school - and eat something for dinner that's not "mystery meat." What a wholesome, 50s era set-up for a comedy about cannibals! I was having a fun time and even asking for "seconds" at the dinner table - until the little boy started having nightmares. Then I lost my appetite completely.

This is NOT a comedy and definitely not for the kiddies. The first fifteen minutes or so are fine, but watch out! When the film-makers start splashing blood around, "Parents" becomes a totally different kind of movie. That's too bad because it could have been a fine little comedy.

I have two questions for the screenwriter of this kitchen fiasco - what did the family eat in their old hometown, and why does their son aged 9 or 10 wait until now to refuse to eat "meat"? My mother made the worst liver in town and we kids somehow choked it down. "C'mon, Michael, how about taking just one bite of this delicious meat dish? Your mother slaved in the kitchen all afternoon..."

Ugh, please pass the Tums and hit the rewind button on the VCR. Think I'll pass on dessert tonight, too!

I'm probably wrong about this (as demonstrated by all the other reader comments), but what I got from this film was a dark eerie tale about a disturbed child whose father's job happens to involve experimentation with corpses. I think the father was bringing the body parts home to experiment on, not eat. He was shown to be obsessed with his job, so this makes sense to me -- and would also explain why he doesn't want his son in the cellar, to find out his secret, that he's been illegally bringing corpses home to experiment upon.

Furthermore, when the school psychologist is killed, they don't show who did it. I think the psychotic child did it, and didn't even realize it.

Finally, at the end of the film, the father knows that the son has seen the corpses in the basement, and THAT'S why he says "So now you know our little secret." As for the meat, he never says, "This is dead people." He just says, "You'll learn to love it, just like your mother did," which is just a response to the boy refusing to eat his meat for a couple weeks in a row. When he sets out to KILL the child, it's only because the child tried to kill him first and it pushed him over the top!

That's my interpretation anyway. I don't think they were cannibals. If so, that's kind of a lame ending.