Meet the Parents is a 1992 American independent comedy film written by Greg Glienna and Mary Ruth Clarke. Glienna also directed and starred in the film as the main protagonist, Greg. The film tells the story of a young man meeting his girlfriend's parents for the first time and the problems that arise when the girl's father takes a disliking to the young man.
Filmed on a budget of approximately $100,000 and shot in and around Chicago, Meet the Parents was not widely distributed and did not earn a large profit at the box office upon its limited release. It did, however, garner some critical acclaim and attention from several people in the film industry who wanted to see the film remade on a bigger budget. Several years after the film's release, Universal Studios purchased the rights to the independent film. After hiring screenwriter Jim Herzfeld to expand the script, a new version of Meet the Parents was filmed and released in October of 2000.
Plot
A clumsy but well-meaning young man named Greg (Greg Glienna) is on his way to visit his girlfriend Pam's (Jacqueline Cahill) parents for the first time. Stopping at a gas station on the way, he is warned by an attendant (Jim Vincent) of his girlfriend's previous boyfriend's catastrophic experience when he first met her overprotective father. He ignores the advice to turn around and go home. Arriving at the parents' home, he quickly becomes a target of the girl's family's anger when he, among other things, clogs and overflows the toilet, destroys the dinner roast and the family's beloved Victrola, almost blinds his girlfriend's mother with a fishing rod, gets into bed with his girlfriend's sister, and accidentally drowns the family dog. When he feels that the family has nearly been brought to the brink of destruction, his girlfriend's father chases him out of the house with a shotgun.