Mum & Dad

First product of a new Film London programme of low-budget films, Mum & Dad pushes the envelope of Brit horror with a local Texas Chain Saw Massacre. A young Polish woman is lured by a friendly fellow cleaner at Heathrow to her family's house just beyond the airport perimeter. Pretty Mum (Dido Miles) and pathetically insignificant Dad (Perry Benson) are sadistic torturers, cannibals and serial killers, living by petty theft. They're a parody of a dysfunctional family from EastEnders; like the Mum and Dad in the Larkin poem, "half the time they're soppy-stern and half at one another's throats". It's truly scary, indeed almost unbearable, stronger on weird family dynamics than psychological insight, and bizarrely comic. If the producers had gone the whole hog of bad taste they might have called their film Fred Hounslow West