Father Knows Worst

            I remember hitchhiking to Connecticut to visit my father in the hospital. My mother had called to tell me that he was riddled with cancer. When I walked into his hospital room he looked up and sardonically said, “Well I must be dying if you’re here.” My father never had much use for me. When he was the coach of our little league team and I would be in the outfield defiantly not catching balls that sailed towards me, I remember the tense silence in the car all the way home. And it’s hard not to forget the look of weary disapproval on his face the night he kicked me out of the house when I was 16. I could never be fooled by the benevolent TV dads of Father Knows Best and Leave It To Beaver. I always knew it was a crock of shit. That’s why through the years I’ve always preferred movies that were the extreme other end of the Make Room For Daddy spectrum. At least it was closer to my truth. Here are 15 of my favorite movie “Dreadful Dads.”

            Frailty. Bill Paxton directed and stars in this fascinating film as a religious fanatic father who trains his sons how to kill strangers he believes are marked by Satan. He devoutly believes God has commanded him to rid the world of demons. Is he really delusional?

            Natural Born Killers. Oliver Stone’s hyperkinetic black comedy about two lovers- Mickey (Woody Harrelson) & Mallory (Juliette Lewis) on a cross country killing spree. Mallory’s flashbacks recall a monstrous, sexually abusive, father (played with gusto by Rodney Dangerfield) who mercifully gets his just desserts.

            Little Boy Blue. John Savage plays Ray West, a PTSD-suffering Vietnam War veteran who, when he gets drunk (which is daily), forces his son (Ryan Phillippe) at gunpoint to have sex with his own mother (Natassja Kinski) in the back of their station wagon so Ray can watch.

            Female Trouble. In John Waters’ hilarious rags-to-the-electric-chair saga, Divine plays Dawn Davenport and Mink Stole stars as her consistently angry daughter Taffy, a “retarded brat,” who enjoys playing car accident at home. Taffy begs her mom to reveal who her real father is, and when she shows up at his grimy Maryland home she finds a drunken brute (played also by Divine) who leeringly vomits on her. What’s a dutiful daughter to do? Taffy grabs a knife from a mayonnaise jar and stabs the piggie to death.

            Mum & Dad. Disturbing British film (loosely based on the Fred West case) about a Polish immigrant cleaner (Olga Fedori) who gets drugged, abducted and chained in the house of a psychotic dad (Perry Benson), who, with his wife (Dido Miles), enjoys torture, rape and murder, all the while the family casually watches pornography in the other room.

            Happiness. In Todd Solondz’s brilliant, pitch-dark, comedy, suburban wife Trish (Cynthia Stevenson) thinks she has the ideal family, little knowing her pedophile psychiatrist husband (Dylan Baker) is drooling over their son’s 11-year-old male school friend.

            The Loved Ones. Sean Byrne’s terrific Australian shocker about a father (John Brumpton), who brutally kidnaps hapless young men (Xavier Samuel) to be his psychotic daughter Lola’s (aka “Princess”) (Robin McLeavy) unwitting prom dates. The men are abducted, dressed in a tux and nailed to the floor under a revolving disco ball in their house of horrors.

            Parents. Bob Balaban’s highly stylized, criminally underrated black comedy about a (on the surface) perfect, prosperous middle class 1950s mom and dad (Mary Beth Hurt & Randy Quaid), who are secretly cannibals, forcing their son to eat his meat at the dinner table and not bother with the body parts hanging on hooks in the basement.

            The Stepfather. Terry O’Quinn is pretty unforgettable as Henry, who repeatedly marries into families and when his image of perfection doesn’t live up to his fantasy, kills them, changes his name and moves on. His new targets are a widow (Shelley Hack) and her suspicious teenage daughter (Jill Schoelen), who tries to expose his deadly secret.

            We Are What We Are. In Jim Mickle’s excellent remake of a 2010 Mexican film, a sensational Bill Sage stars as a widower and religious fanatic who raises his daughters Rose (Julia Garner) and Iris (Ambyr Childers) deep in the woods and forces them to eat a sacramental feast of human flesh (harvested from kidnapped strangers).

            The Shining. “Wendy, I’m home!” cries the deranged, possessed dad (played with fiendish intensity by Jack Nicholson), as he smashes down a door with an axe, hunting down his family at a deserted, off-season Colorado hotel, in Stanley Kubrick’s chilly rendition of Stephen King’s best seller.

            Scream For Help. Entertaining 1984 thriller starring Rachael Kelly as a teenage girl who is convinced her new step-father (David Allen Brooks) is out to kill her mother (wonderful Marie Masters), but no one believes her. The movie keeps surprising, and is so much fun to watch.

            The Woman. In this brutal Lucky McKee film, Sean Bridgers plays a well-respected lawyer, hunter and dad named Chris Cleeks, who captures a feral, cannibalistic woman (Polyanna McIntosh) out in the forest. He drags her home, chaining her in the root cellar for his sick amusement. His sadistic son (Zach Rand), a chip off the old block, enjoys tormenting Daddy’s new toy, while Chris’s abused wife (Angela Bettis) and daughter (Lauren Ashley Carter) suffer in silence.

            Clown. This wonderfully warped wonder, directed by Jon Watts, is about Kent (Andy Powers), a real estate agent who finds a clown costume in one of his empty properties. So as not to disappoint his son at his birthday party (when the hired clown flakes out), Kent slips into it, only to find the next morning he cannot remove the red nose, colored wig or suit. It seems integrated into his flesh, and fills him with a demonic hunger to eat children.

            The Clovehitch Killer. A fascinatingly creepy, slow burn, thriller starring Dylan McDermott as the well-respected, married, church volunteer and Boy Scout troupe leader in Kentucky. His shy son (terrific Charlie Plummer) finds some disturbing material that leads him to believe his dad might actually be the serial killer known as “Clovehitch,” who has killed ten women in their hometown.