Petals on the Wind

Petals on the Wind ~ When Lifetime did Flowers in the Attic and it was even a little bit successful, it was pretty much guaranteed they would do a sequel... especially when there's one tailor made as part of the book series it based on. I should note however this was given a green light before Flowers even aired. That's how sure Lifetime was of the source material. So here's Petals on the Wind, which was just as popular as Flowers back in the day, but didn't have a crappy movie version to tarnish it. Let's see how good or bad the Lifetime treatment is.

Just as Flowers artfully used a cover of "Sweet Child o' Mine" to promote it, Petals similarly uses a cover of Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight," a song that was actually around when the book came out, and intros the movie almost as if this was a series rather than movies. Is it? "Last time on Flowers in the Attic..." makes me wonder. Not that I would mind a well done TV series...

It begins ten years after Flowers, and the children have been recast. I guess the shooting schedule for the final season of "Mad Men" might interfered possibly for Kiernan Shipka. And while the book picks up immediately after Flowers, the movie is a decade later, necessitating older actors. Chicken or the egg here, I have to wonder what came first - time shift or recasting? Either way, Rose McIver as Cathy is a weak sister to Kiernan Shipka.

The ten year jump that begins at Paul Sheffield's funeral does happily evade the creepy doctor character who adopted the children and tried to marry Cathy. Sometimes gothic romance and horror take a left turn into soap opera so bizarre, it really is better left forgotten. Not that a story that centers on incest isn't already inappropriately creepy... but you know what I mean. Good move, Lifetime.

The sad news is however that all of the rest of this seems very forced. From Cathy's abusive relationship with Julian to Carrie being bullied at school, and on top of it all is Heather Graham and Ellen Burstyn's characters being shoehorned roughly into the story. I had a lot of trouble with Burstyn especially after literally just watching her brilliant comedic turn on "Louie" just before this.

Will Kemp is great as Julian, Cathy's husband in the book, boyfriend here, as long as you stop visualizing him as Starsky from "Starsky and Hutch," a comparison that gets difficult when you see his car. Rose McIver is no Shipka as I mentioned but she is certainly as hatable as Cathy should be. She deserves what she gets in so many ways. This was okay, not as good as Flowers, but a suitable sequel. The over the top revenge ending is well worth the two hour watch.

Lifetime has already announced plans to do the next two books in the Dollanganger series by V.C. Andrews, If There Be Thorns and Seeds of Yesterday in 2015, but there's been no word about the fifth and final installment, Garden of Shadows, probably because the ads refer to Seeds as the final installment. Interesting.

Lizzie Borden Took an Ax

A fairly vivid memory of my childhood is the fight for Lizzie Borden. Not so much about whether I could stay up to watch the infamous TV movie, it was more about would I even be allowed to watch it. The Legend of Lizzie Borden, starring Elizabeth Montgomery of "Bewitched" in the title role, was one of 'those' shows. It had a warning label that it was for mature audiences only.

Other than fighting with my parents, the warning label, and that all the kids at school were talking about it the next day, I remember very little about it. I know it was theatrically released in Europe with scenes of Elizabeth Montgomery committing the murders in the nude. And of course there was the jump rope rhyme - "Lizzie Borden took an ax, and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one."

We had all heard it was a true story, or rather that the movie was based on a true story, one of a horrible murderess who took out both her parents with an ax. I learned later the facts of the case, and that Lizzie Borden was actually acquitted of the crimes and went on to live in the same town of Fall River for another four decades, albeit in infamy, but a free citizen.

Now, for the second week in a row (first with the Flowers in the Attic remake) the Lifetime Network makes a splash with a movie event, the both humorously and horrifically titled Lizzie Borden Took an Ax. In the title role this time is Christina Ricci, and as much as I love her, she's no Elisabeth Montgomery, despite the resemblance.

As with the aforementioned Flowers, Lifetime uses music as a lure by playing the hypnotic "Psychotic Girl" by The Black Keys over the opening credits. The alternative soundtrack continues throughout as if music supervisor Tree Adams didn't know if he was scoring a Lizzie Borden movie or Marie Antoinette 2. I'm not complaining, I was digging the tunage, I just question the appropriateness of it.

Christina Ricci imbues her Lizzie with a believable cold detachment. Clea DuVall, perhaps best known from HBO's "Carnivale" and more recently "American Horror Story," gives one of her best performances as Lizzie's sister Emma. They are the showpieces of this gothic crime drama with all the proper trappings of a crime of the century.

This is a good version of the legend, and while not necessarily sticking to the facts, it's a good story. I loved the music, I loved the muted colors, but I wish we could have had Elizabeth Montgomery instead of Christina Ricci. Worth watching.

Flowers in the Attic

When I was a kid, a coming of age kid in the late 1970s, this was the book (and in rather quick succession, series of books) that not only everyone read, it was the one you had to read, and were forbidden to read.

"Flowers in the Attic" by V.C. Andrews is at its core a tale of forbidden love. A rich girl has an incestuous relationship with an uncle, and both are cast from the family. They live almost happily ever after outside the family, with a teenage son and daughter as well as pre-teen twins, until the uncle dies in a car accident. The mother must return to her family for help. The children are locked away in a huge attic because her parents are a bit deranged. While the mother is accepted back into the family slowly, the son and daughter enter puberty in the attic, where it's sinisterly intended they never escape from.

That's the first book. It continues in "Petals on the Wind," "If There Be Thorns," "Seeds of Yesterday," and "Garden of Shadows," a Gothic horror series of books telling the repeating incestuous history of this family, all with cool cut out peekaboo covers. Because of the content, they were banned in many schools, but everybody, including boys like me, read them. They were mostly narrated by the daughter, Cathy Dollanganger, and there was much speculation that the stories were true, and Cathy was actually the wheelchair-bound V.C. Andrews. Oh, the rumor filled days from the before the internet!

A disastrous movie starring Victoria Tennant, Louise Fletcher, and Kristy Swanson followed in 1987. To say it was disappointing would be a serious understatement. It was almost as if the producers didn't know anything about the book(s), and the result was at best a primer for the book, if that. It was a bad movie in both execution and performance.

Now, almost three decades later, the Lifetime Network is trying to take the Dollanganger clan the movie route. This production has Heather Graham as the mother, Ellen Burstyn as the grandmother, and Kiernan Shipka as Cathy. While Graham is seared onto my eyelids eternally from Lenny Kravitz' "American Woman" video and hard from me to imagine as matronly, I think Shipka is perfect casting. The simple fact that so many times I have wanted to slap the crap out of her snotty and rebellious Sally on "Mad Men" makes her the perfect Cathy - because really, the character is just a spoiled bitch. I loved the books, but by the end of them, I kinda felt she deserved the tragedy that was her life. Just my opinion.

I really liked Lifetime's ad campaign for the movie with Trees' haunting version of "Sweet Child o' Mine" and the teasers calling it 'The Book You Were Forbidden to Read.' Nice. Shipka fulfills suspicions, Graham overcomes my perceived limitations, and most surprisingly, Burstyn is not only properly evil in her role as antagonist, she even manages to garner sympathy at some points.

This is perhaps not a perfect version of Flowers, but it is easily light years better than the first movie version. Anyone chased away by the 1987 film should check this out, it's the movie we should have gotten, and a much more satisfying translation of the book.