Maargh and Paargh: film parents from hell

Larkin had it right about this Mum & Dad. A pair of amateur, DIY torturers, they like abducting innocent Polish cleaners and forcing them to join their happy family – on pain of death. Steve Sheil's horror flick is supposedly based - with sweet sensitivity – on the true-life killers Fred and Rosemary West. Photograph: PR

The title is meant ironically. Mommie Dearest offers a behind-the-scenes, daughter's eye view of the great Joan Crawford: a luminous star in public; a vindictive, alcoholic monster behind closed doors. Just don't mention the wire coat hangers. Photograph: Kobal

To lose your child once smacks of carelessness. To do so twice smacks of something altogether more sinister. Still, considering that the child in question is the loathsome Kevin McCallister, we are almost tempted to give the Home Alone 2 parents a get-out-of-jail-free card. No jury would convict them anyhow. Photograph: Kobal

The sins of the father afflict unto the next generation. The Godfather Part III, in which Michael Corleone strives to put the bad old days behind only to see his beloved daughter Mary take an assassin's bullet in the chest. In a curious case of life-imitating-art, director Francis Coppola handed the role of Mary to his own cherished offspring, Sofia, and thus delivered her to a storm of bad reviews. Photograph: Kobal

Rosemary's Baby boasts a parent who is quite literally from hell. Its daddy is Satan, summoned up by the fussy old pensioners who live down the hall. Mia Farrow's anxious little New York gamine? She's just the carrier. Photograph: Kobal

Get thee a vasectomy! Steve Martin plays a priapic dad in Cheaper by the Dozen, pumping copious helpings of seed into his pliant wife in order to test his theory that 12 kids consume as much as 2. Here he is – eyes alight, sap rising – as he prepares to make an stab at lucky number 13. Photograph: Kobal

Be warned: absent parents can be just as dangerous as steady ones. Once, long ago, Royal Tenenbaum was father to a trio of precocious whizz-kids. Then he upped and left them to a life of burn-out and breakdown, neurosis and depression. But will things be any better now Royal's back on the scene? Photograph: Kobal

Turns out adoptive fathers are no better than absent natural ones. See There Will Be Blood for details. Shortly after this idyllic scene, little HW lost his hearing and was tricked by his dad into boarding a train out of town. "I've abandoned my child!" Daniel Plainview confesses – albeit under duress. "I've abandoned my boy!" Photograph: Kobal

Let's not forget bad mothers. Ma Mere stars Isabelle Huppert as an oversexed matriarch who responds to newly arrived widowhood by seducing her teenaged son. In France this is a recognised stage of the grieving process. Photograph: PR

Jack Torrance enjoys a quiet moment of bonding with his little son Danny in The Shining. But the work is piling up and the novel won't write itself and the voices in his head keep babbling, babbling. The solution? Chop Danny up with an axe, laughing maniacally all the while. Problem solved. Photograph: Kobal