SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Lawbolisted Powerful

DubyaHan The movie is wildly uneven but lively and timely - in its own surreal way

FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

AlexAtkinUK While the plot starts off fair enough, child looked after (abused) by her grandparents because her mother was an alcoholic, it all goes downhill from there. Its not even clear WHY they were so mean to her, did they resent looking after her? Its not entirely clear.The acting by the little girl is so incredibly forced most of the time, you get little hints that she probably CAN act but the writing and directing of the story never gives her a chance.For most of the movie the people she is killing very much deserved it, they pushed her to it. But as it devolves into killing innocent people it goes down hill fast.The killing of her teacher who has nut allergies was especially contrived and it was made so obvious it was coming long before she did anything to earn it, my cat could have recognised the signs.Dragging us through the character finding out what an epi-pen is and oh look, she just happened to be tasting wedding cake with marzipan soon after and there HAPPENS to still be some in the fridge later. :rolls eyes:Except anyone with a severe nut allergy wouldn't eat something without asking first, let alone marzipan that you can usually smell a mile away. Then the fact Almond allergies are pretty rare anyway even amongst nut allergy sufferers, yet the symptoms come on so fast she is unable to defend herself from a 10 year old girl to call 911? Give me a break!Its such a shame, as other movies have done so much better with similar material.

edwagreen The Bad Seed, move over. After a child is finally reunited with her alcoholic-free mother, we see the young lass resorting to murder and absolute mayhem as she feels that everyone is against her and is trying to separate her from her mother.Young Miss Hentschel is mesmerizing as the totally disturbed child, brought up in her home where she pushed her grandfather, an abuser, down the steps to his death and remains with her grandmother, a Frances Sternahagen look-alike, who wants compensation for the years she took care of the child and winds up pushed off a cliff by the monster child.Made fun of in school by other children, the child imagines that her teacher wants to send her to a school for bad girls and she does away with the teacher as well. How come Miss Golden never changed the seating arrangements in the classroom to move our traumatized youngster from the boy and girl who constantly harassed her?Find drama dealing with emotional disturbance and the tragedy that pursues.

mgconlan-1 Last night Lifetime presented two recent TV-movie productions back to back, first the March 19 "world premiere" of "Mommy's Little Girl" and then a repeat of last Saturday's "world premiere," The Stepchild. I had high hopes for "Mommy's Little Girl" as soon as I saw Christine Conradt's name among the writing credits — she came up with the "original" story and co-wrote the actual script with Mark Sanderson, while her frequent collaborator Curtis James Crawford directed — and I wasn't disappointed: though both the overall premise and several specific incidents are heavily, shall we say, "borrowed" from Maxwell Anderson's play "The Bad Seed" (and the marvelous film Mervyn LeRoy made from it in 1956 — at least it's a marvelous film if you stop watching it at the point where the play ends and avoid the tacked-on ending the Production Code Administration insisted on), "Mommy's Little Girl" is a great suspense thriller. Maybe it's not an all-time classic but it holds the attention, it entertains and gives us the nice clean dirty frissons of fun for which we (at least I) go to Lifetime in the first place.It begins at the home of Elana Connell (Deborah Grover), an insanely (literally) moralistic woman who for the last 10 years has raised her grandchild Sadie (Emma Hentschel) after Sadie's mom Theresa (Fiona Gubelmann, top-billed) flamed out on alcohol (and possibly drugs as well, though the Conradt-Sanderson script isn't specific about exactly what her addictions were) and the authorities were going to put Sadie in the foster-care system (the word "care" there should really be in quotes!) if grandma didn't take her. Grandma is a flinty type who lives in a clapboard house — one could readily imagine both the house and Deborah Grover being models for Grant Wood — and she's devastated when Theresa shows up at her door, announces she's clean, sober and engaged to a well-to-do toy company executive named Aaron Myers (James Gallanders, one of the few genuinely attractive men in a Lifetime movie who isn't stuck playing a villain!) who's already got a son, Josh (Mikael Conde), from an earlier wife. For the first act or so it's not altogether apparent just where the Conradt-style intrigue is going to come from, but it soon develops that Sadie has become a spoiled-brat psycho who'll do just about anything to get her way, from ratting on Josh when she catches him drinking in the backyard to responding to two class bullies at school — she's never been to school before because her grandma home-schooled her — Dylan (Sam Ashe Arnold, a cute tow-headed kid who'll probably grow up to be a heartbreaker) and Alliree (Mia Kechichian) — by stealing a box of Dylan's action-figure toys, using a cigarette lighter she inherited from her grandfather (John Koensgen) to melt the face off one of them, and taping the mutilated toy to the inside of Dylan's locker door (how did she open it?). It's about this time {spoiler alert!] that we learn Sadie had previously killed when he tried to take her down to the basement for "punishment" once too often, and as the story unfolds she also knocks off her grandma and her seemingly nice and caring teacher, Miss Goldin (Alix Sideris) in a scene obviously ripped off from "The Little Foxes/" Not only is the overall plot strongly reminiscent of "The Bad Seed" but director Crawford probably screened it for Emma Hentschel, since her portrayal of Sadie is clearly patterned on the superb little-bitch performance of Patty McCormick in "The Bad Seed", all gooey sweet smiles on the surface and psychopathic rage underneath. Though I might have preferred a dark ending along the lines of Anderson's original for "The Bad Seed" (in which "bad girl" Rhoda Penmark and her father are left together after the death of her mom, the last person who knew the secret that innocent-looking Rhoda was really a "bad seed" psycho killer), and there are a few of the plot holes typical of Conradt's work, for the most part "Mommy's Little Girl" is a solidly entertaining thriller that's helped by the fact that we know exactly who the culprit is and therefore the suspense isn't over whodunit but how the characters are going to find out who we know is doin' it.