Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”
OK, so this movie, “Parents” is hosted by the Sven Squad, who did a pretty good job of covering this dark 1989 film directed by Bob Balaban, set in the 1950s California suburbia. The main cast included Randy Quaid (Nick Laemle), Mary Beth Hurt (Lily Laemle), Bryan Madorsky (Michael Laemle), and Sandy Dennis (Millie Dew). Interestingly, Madorsky never continued acting after this movie and went on to become an accountant.
This movie reminds me of that Barbara Streisand song “People Who Eat People.” No, wait, that’s not right. Sena and I both saw the movie and we’re not certain about whether this is about a mentally vulnerable 10-year-old boy who hallucinates or about something really sinister. It’s a little of both. As usual, this is not a serious movie review and there are a couple of links below to serious writers.
As a retired psychiatrist, I tend to lean toward a psychological interpretation of a fair number of scenes in which Michael sees scary things. On the other hand, while that’s plausible early in the film, it’s less tenable when the school social worker, Millie Dew, sees scary things too like severed limbs and whole corpses in the basement of the Laemle house.
We both chuckled about Toxico, the aptly named company where Nick works as a research scientist in the Human Cadaver section where he develops Agent Orange type defoliants and requests choice liver cuts for mysterious reasons and which may be ending up as entrees on the dinner table.
The Laemle kitchen has a counter with a rack full of heavy cookbooks on it, none of which contain recipes for fricasseed fingers, I’m pretty sure. They live in a conformist neighborhood, which of course implies that everyone is snacking on milk and postman kidney cutlets just before bedtime.
I keep trying to think of a reason why the name “Millie Dew” was chosen for the school social worker role. It sounds like a joke to make you think of mildew, which is a fungus. I can’t recall whether Nick was making a kind of chemical fungus which made vegetation forget to take up glucose which led to jungle defoliation or what. And what point would the joke have had?
Maybe Millie was “breaking the mold” of the conformist society in which she didn’t really fit. Or maybe Michael felt like she was “growing” on him. See what I did there?
We were both creeped out by this movie and giving it a black comedy label might fit if you think of it as black mold. It kept us on the edge of our seats, but it’s too dark. Both Sena and I give it a 2/5 Shrilling Chicken Rating.
“Criminally Underrated: Parents” by Joseph Neff. April 5, 2026 (approximate), on Spectrum Culture website. https://spectrumculture.com/2026/04/01/criminally-underrated-parents/
“Why director Bob Balaban chose to film Parents (1989) from the perspective of a child” By MeTV Staff. April 15, 2026. On Yikesgeist, MeTV. https://metv.com/stories/why-director-bob-balaban-chose-to-film-parents-1989-from-the-perspective-of-a-child
Go Retire Psychiatrist 