A black comedy constructed out of the materials of an only child's overactive imagination. It's just a little disappointing, a little poetically licentious, when it turns out that that overactive imagination belongs really to the scriptwriter, Christopher Hawthorne, rather than to the patriphobic little hero. Nonetheless, the movie is a lot of fun for a long while, a phantasmagoria of Populuxe décors and film noir photography, with suburban life in the 1950s pinned down to every last bowl of Party Mix ("Instead of raisins I used miniature marshmallows") and metal school lunch-box. The alienness of that era may be an easy artistic short-cut to the parental strangeness, but it certainly helps get us there. Mary Beth Hurt is the epitome of the TV sitcom mom (re-runs only), and Randy Quaid conveys all the five-o'clock-shadowed menace that has traditionally made such an effective threat out of "Wait till your father gets home!" The director is actor Bob Balaban, and with his first such assignment he demonstrates himself to be a director indeed. Witness the shot of Dad's head when he comes home from the office and catches his son playing in the freezer: the framing, angle, distance are absolute perfection. (1989) — Duncan Shepherd
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