Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3097 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-12-26
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 84 minutes

Customer Reviews

Outstanding
Watched this without knowing anything about it. As a huge fan of the horror genre, I am used to disappointment and lacklustre offerings.
This is an outrageously good horror film; it centres around a 'family' who kidnap and torture a young Polish imigrant. Whereas there are elements of graphic violence, there is so much more to this film that is unsaid and understated, making it an absolute masterpiece. A film of ideas which places horror back in the everyday and the common place, a context which is so much more satisfying than glossy high budget remakes.
If you have even a passing interest in horror, or have the stomach to take such material, this is a beautiful crafted and sensitively made film that trawls the darkest of places. It's brilliant to see British horror back on the map. A must see.

Airport Of 1,000 Corpses
"Mum and Dad" is a United Kingdom take on sadistic families such as those in the The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [1974] or The Firefly family of House of 1,000 Corpses [2003] ] fame.

The story is that of a young Polish girl working at an airport, who is lured to the home of a co-worker where she is then enslaved for torture and mutilation by a perverse and psychopathic cannibal family.

However as it's set in England, there are no guns, and it's grittier for it; not least because a female Polish immigrant worker was abducted and then murdered in Scotland in similar circumstances not that long ago, and of course it throws up the none-too-distant shadows of English serial killers Fred and Rosemary West and their home dungeon.

Olga Fedori plays the Polish girl Lena very well, initially capturing the polite, friendly yet slightly nervous manners of a foreigner trying to fit in without causing offence and yet at the same time remaining cautious. It's this caution that means she has to be tricked so that she misses the last bus, and has no option but to accompany her co-worker, the "Daughter", back to her home ... and into the clutches of Mum and Dad.

Dad gets his kicks from chopping things up, Mum gets hers from playing with it first, and the children assist them with their perversions in order to stay in their good books, gain favours, or at least to avoid punishment.

Lena finds her ability to move freely and communicate restricted by foul means, and realises very soon that if she is going to survive and escape, she is going to have to play along as best she can.

Lena's transformation from the quiet foreign worker through to someone with a battered, abused, desperate and scheming survivor mentality is excellently realised by Fedori as the story moves horribly on towards its conclusion. There were a couple of moments where I thought it might have got a tad silly - at a pinch, the Christmas Day scene could have been British TV's "The Royle Family", just envisaged as psychopaths - however overall there was a genuine sense of monstrosity in isolation. The isolation was another key factor, the irony of the story unfolding next to an airport where thousands of people would pass through, yet all anonymous and all en route elsewhere, the scenes broken by planes taking off overhead giving a sense of transience above and stagnation below.

"Mum & Dad" isn't without its gory scenes, but it doesn't heap it on unnecessarily and gore isn't the main theme here, it's the bizarre familial relationships between the characters that Lena needs to unlock if she is ever to make good her escape.

A good, well directed and well-acted British horror.

Genuinely disturbing...
I bought this DVD not knowing a great deal about it, but based on other Amazon reviews it looked like my kind of film. It far exceeded my expectations and I can honestly say that, as well as being the most disturbing thing I've seen in years, it's also one of the best horror films I've ever seen. Rather than simply re-hash the recent torture porn genre, it takes the same basic premise and gives it a suburban twist to produce some really startling scenes. I won't give anything away, but don't watch it with a full stomach!