Just in time for Mother's Day, the folks at Elite Entertainment release this late-80's splatter film that plays on the idea that comes across every kid's mind sooner or later (and usually quite often during the teen years) -- that their parents are crazy.

Things are (surprise!) quite dysfunctional in suburbia, and just to make sure we're getting the naughty point, shortly after the credits we see a couple in bed who are having an affair. (Maybe the director, James Aviles Martin, is making a reference to Psycho.) The movie proper begins with a man who suddenly realizes his arm may have been ripped (or perhaps chewed?) off in one of the most unrealistic reaction shots I've seen. I'm not kidding when I say close to a full minute of screen time passes before the fellow realizes something has happened to his arm.

And things go pretty much on an unchanged trajectory from there. Visually, this is one of the least interesting looking horror movies I've seen in a while. Consistently flat and uninteresting shots, coupled with wildly uneven performances (Marie Michaels, who plays one of the titular child-chompin' mommies, was in this film and Martin Scorsese's masterpiece GoodFellas at the same time -- and is memorable in both movies -- but I wonder which one she featured more prominently on her resume) and some very well-executed gore shots. Quite a few of the limbs these bone-crunchin' brood-squeezers nosh on look disturbingly realistic -- which only serves to make some of the acting seem even worse by comparison.

The film gives us the usual band of teen misfits to root for, but Zev Schlasinger's script isn't very adept at providing us with memorable traits to differentiate them (at least they're all visually dissimiliar). These are strictly of the cannon-fodder school. But you have Linda, standing in as the poor man's Jamie Lee Curtis, her gal pal Joyce, Joyce's ice-cream vending boyfriend (one of the movie's better scenes involves what might be the worst first impression between Joyce's mom and her boyfriend as they meet) and the angry j.d.-type that looks and sounds like your best friend in high school's bad impression of John Bender from The Breakfast Club. These are the ones who have to crack the case of how to get their mothers to stop twisting the Atkins diet into something its creator never intended and get them back on to eating the lesser animals, because the adults are all pretty ineffective in the movie -- either crazy, drunk, distracted by affairs or just plain slow on the draw.

Save your money. The disc is very light on features, with only the less-than-stellar trailer that actually makes the movie seem dumber than it really is (I guess they were really going for the lowest common denominator on this one). The widescreen transfer is okay. It looks like a movie that was shot more than a few years ago and hasn't been painstakingly preserved in the intervening seasons, so I can say it felt like an accurate transfer. It is widescreen (1.85:1), but as I mentioned earlier the cinematography is so flat and uninteresting that they probably could have cropped it and I wouldn't have felt like I'd missed something.

Maybe Elite knows that this one isn't much of a winner and decided to go light on the extras, since they usually pile 'em on when they're releasing one of the gems of the genre.

(As a side note, if you are interested in renting a "bad mommy" horror movie for Mother's Day, I'd recommend a pair of cult favorites -- Brian DePalma's film version of Carrie and David Cronenberg's The Brood -- and outside of the horror genre there are a pair of the ultimate movie bad moms ever, Angela Lansbury in the original film version of The Manchurian Candidate and Margaret Wycherly in White Heat with James Cagney.)