Forgotten Gems: "The Bad Seed"

Patty McCormack as Rhoda Penmark

Talk about obsessions... I don't exactly remember the first time I saw Mervyn LeRoy's 1956 thriller The Bad Seed, but I know it was Mom who introduced me to it. (Oh, yes. She had a dark side, too ). Based on the stage play by Maxwell Anderson and the novel by William March, the film explores mid-20th Century ideas about DNA and Nature Vs Nurture.

Young Rhoda Penmark (Patty McCormack, left)  is the perfect child. Smart, neat and loving, she hides a dark secret. When Rhoda's classmate, Claude Daigle is drowned at Rhoda's private school annual Spring picnic, Rhoda is suspected of killing him because he won the school's penmanship medal over her.

As Rhoda's mother Christine (Nancy Kelly) delves into her past, she comes to learn that she is the child of the infamous murderess Bessie Denker and may have passed her mother's psychopathy onto Rhoda. Henry Jones; William Hopper; Paul Fix; Elizabeth Varden and the amazing Eileen Heckart round out the stellar cast as Rhoda's family and victims, most of whom reprise their original Broadway stage roles. Jones, as the half-witted handyman Leroy and Heckart as the grieving alcoholic mother of the murdered Claude are especially good, but this is McCormack's movie and she owns every scene she's in.

Yes, it has a mid-50's camp feel about it, but The Bad Seed still has the power to be creepy and awful. Of course, having been produced under the Hayes Code, the movie couldn't be released with the  play and novel's original ending (SPOILER ALERT) and young Rhoda is struck by retributional lightning at the end, though she survives in the original versions.

I have wanted to direct a production of Anderson's play for almost 30 years, but have yet to come across a young actress capable of convincingly pulling off the role of Rhoda, while trying to justify the play's mid-century values and still holding relevance, today (though gun violence-related events in the past few years have made me rethink that).

The 1985 TV remake starring Blair Brown; Lynn Redgrave; Richard Kiley; David Ogden Stiers and openly gay actor Chad Allen doesn't hold a candle to the original.

If you are a genre film fan and have never seen this movie, you should. If you have seen it, then you know why it deserves to be seen,





Again, give me the money and I'll make a version of this story that will make you poop you pants!

Mwuahahahhahahahaha!

More, anon.
Prospero

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I Finally Saw "Orphan."

I don't always get to see as many movies as I would like, but I did want to see the much-talked about Orphan, and now thanks to On Demand and a late Sunday afternoon to myself, I sat down and watched it.

This haunted-looking waif is Esther, a child brought to America from Russia by a family tragically killed in a fire not long after bringing her home. Esther barely got out alive.

Or so, that's what grieving parents Kate (Vera Farmiga) and John (Peter Sarsgaard) are told by Sister Abigail (Warehouse 13's CCH Pounder) at the orphanage where they first meet her. The couple already have two children, the pre-adolescent Daniel and sweet, deaf Maxine, but their last child was still-born and they've decided to share the love they had for that baby with a child in need. Esther is well-spoken, well-mannered, artistic and charming and she soon joins the family, even though she is a little different. Take her clothing, for example: Esther dresses like a Victorian era porcelain doll, with frills and bows. And she never takes off the ribbons on her wrists and throat.

Esther quickly bonds with little Max, picking up sign language with ease and drawing Max into her confidence. Meanwhile, Mom Kate and brother Danny aren't so sure. After a few unsettling incidents, it is clear that there is something very wrong with Esther. Of course, Danny is too scared to say anything and everyone thinks that recovering alcoholic and still-grieving mom Kate has gone off the wagon.

Director Juame Collet-Sera's previous film, House of Wax, is most well-known for killing Paris Hilton with a pipe through her head, inviting all sorts of hollow-head jokes. And while it wasn't actually good, it was certainly lurid. Orphan is a much better film and Collet-Sera has learned how to build tension, even if the story is sort of been-there-done-that (The Bad Seed; The Good Son; The Godsend). And while the script by first-time writer David Johnson does add a unique twist to the Evil Child Syndrome formula, I still managed to figure it out before the reveal, something I really hate.

Sarsgaard (Kinsey; An Education) and Farmiga (Joshua - another Evil Child movie I've never seen) are fine, especially Farmiga. Kate's frustration as things spiral out of control is what propels most of the movie's suspense and Farmiga makes sure all of our sympathies lie with her. And doe-eyed Aryana Engineer uses those eyes to full advantage as Max, expressing every emotion without uttering a word. But I have to give true credit to 12 year-old Isabelle Furhman as Esther, a complex and decidedly disturbed character. In the hands of some other young actresses, the role would have been a parody of the genre; unintentionally funny and completely detrimental to the film (though it would probably have gotten equal attention for it's awfulness). Furhman plays just the right balance between unadulterated evil and childlike innocence. Esther is one of the creepier entries into the KCS genre.

While hardly a perfect film, Orphan is a fun, gruesome, twisted and surprisingly original entry into the Evil Child Syndrome genre of horror. **1/2 (Two and a half out of Four Stars).

And before you go and say something nasty about the Jonbenet joke, I think that entire industry is abhorrent and only used the image to express that opinion. No matter what I or you may think about the child pageant industry, her death remains a tragic and unresolved reminder of how precious life is. Sorry. Didn't mean to get quite that dark, but there you have it.

More, anon.
Prospero

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Evil Child Syndrome

Poor bunny! Looks like he was owned by an Evil Child. You know the ones I'm talking about - they're either sociopathic killers, children of the Devil, possessed by the Devil or the Devil, himself.

In movies, evil children are usually portrayed as attractive, innocent-looking tykes who don't look like they could so much as hurt a fly. They are often children of powerful folks like senators or ambassadors, but just as often their parents are everyday folks who don't have a clue that something is wrong until it's much too late to do anything about it.

Such is the case with one of the earliest Evil Children in film, Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed. Rhoda is a perfect child - her manners are impeccable and she can charm the pants off almost everyone she meets. her dresses are always crisp and spotless; her hair is always in perfectly symmetrical braids; her disposition is always sunny and bright and she'll kill anyone who gets in the way of her having what she wants.
When Claude Daigle wins the penmanship medal she thought she deserved, Rhoda drowns him while on the school picnic. And when lazy handyman Leroy suspects she may have had something to with Claude's death, she sets him on fire while he sleeps on a bed of excelsior in the shed. Eventually we come to learn that Rhoda's mother, Christine, is actually the child of infamous murderess Bessie Denker, and Christine may well have passed the murder gene onto her daughter. Reprising her role from the Broadway play of the same name, Patty McCormick plays Rhoda so that even while she has almost everyone fooled, the audience immediately recognizes her for what she is. In the play, Rhoda survives her mother's attempt to kill her with sleeping pills, but in 1956, the Hayes Code made sure that evil got its comeuppance in movies.

As the cold war progressed, Evil Children became symbols for Communism. In 1960's Village of the Damned, the entire village of Midwich falls asleep at the same time, and when they awaken, most of the fertile women are pregnant. Nine months later, a group of nearly identical children are born, with strange powers that allow them to compel people to hurt or even kill themselves. Are they aliens or something much more insidious? Based on the novel "The Midwich Cuckoos" by John Wyndham, Village of the Damned was remade in 1995 by John Carpenter. Special effects had progressed quite a bit, but sadly, Carpenter's version is just silly.

By 1968, novelist Ira Levin and director Roman Polanski had turned the Evil Child into something far worse than just evil. In Rosemary's Baby, the Evil child was the Antichrist, himself. Struggling actor Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes) and his wife, Rosemary (Mia Farrow) move in to the Dakota, where Rosemary finds her nosy neighbor Minnie Castavet (the incomparable Ruth Gordon in her Oscar-winning role) a bit of a noodge. A sweet and caring noodge, but a noodge, nonetheless. Of course, it turns out that Guy has sold his soul for his career and Rosemary's womb for the Devils' baby. Even kindly OBGYN Ralph Bellamy is on it. What chance does a fashionably skinny young wife stand against such odds?

In the 1970's, the Antichrist was resurrected as the son of Gregory Peck and Lee Remick in The Omen. Damien (spelled differently than my dear D spells it) is the son of US Ambassador Robert Thorn (Peck) and his wife, Katherine (Remick). After the nanny commits suicide, claiming "Damien, it's all for you!" a photojournalist (David Warner) becomes suspicious and starts seeing images of people's deaths in his photographs, before they actually happen. After some investigating (and a new nanny in the form of Billie Whitelaw as Mrs. Baylock), Thorn discovers the truth behind his son's birth, and even though he is triumphant against some Satanic Rottweilers, Evil wins out in the end. I remember seeing this film in high school and it being the first movie I ever saw someone (Warner) get decapitated in a movie. A 2006 remake starring Liev Schreiber was less than scary.

By the 90's, the Evil Child had gone back to being a sociopath, and McCaulay Culkin was The Good Son, an orphan taken in my his aunt and uncle, to wreak havoc on his cousin (future Hobbit, Elijah Wood).

Lately, orphans have taken the blame for evil. In the Spanish horror flick The Orphanage, a woman returns to the orphanage where she was raised, hoping to take in troubled children and give them the love they so rightly deserve. But something is not right:

And most recently, a vicious 9 year-old took the Evil Child to a whole new level in Orphan, a film I have yet to see, but which many have said is exceptionally twisted and dark.

Hmmm... What comes around, goes around, I guess. Of course, we all know that children aren't exactly evil. Nasty, vicious and self-serving, but not actually evil, with a capital E. Though you'd have a hard time convincing my sister and my dear friend Tracy of that.

More terrors, anon.
Prospero

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