by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was a Lifetime
production, recently premiered last Saturday, called Adopting Terror, an intense and rather confusing melodrama which
has two pages listed on imdb.com,
one a pre-production page that does not identify it as a TV-movie — were they hoping for a theatrical release
and sold it to Lifetime when they didn’t get one? — and one a post-release page
but one which doesn’t identify many of the actors, including star Sean Astin,
John Astin’s son. The plot: Tim Broadbent (Sean Astin, a stocky guy of medium
height who doesn’t really look that much like his dad, John Astin of The
Addams Family) and his wife Cheryl (who
appears to have been played by Kristen Quintrall — the imdb.com pages list her
character as “Nikki” and this suggests a last-minute script revision by writers
Micho Rutare, who also directed, and Nik Frank-Lehrer) adopt a few-months-old
baby who’s been in state custody.
They do this through something called the
Community First Adoption Agency, headed by Dr. Ziegler (Michael Gross), and the
social worker assigned to the case to supervise the adoption and recommend
whether it should be made permanent at the final hearing is a willowy young
(younger than Cheryl!) white woman named Fay Hopkins (Monet Mazur). What the
Broadbents don’t know but we do — at least we do if we watched this movie from the beginning (a
couple of people who posted to imdb.com about it didn’t and therefore were
confused) — is that the baby, Mona, was taken away from her parents in the
first place and made a ward of the state because she was living with her dad,
Kevin Anderson (the tall, dark and sexy Brendan Fehr) when Child Protective
Services got a call that she was being neglected, and when their worker (an
African-American, like so many voice-of-reason authority figures in Lifetime
movies) came over, Kevin shot her — presumably non-fatally, since he was
convicted only of simple assault and was paroled in less than a year — then was
ambushed by police outside the apartment building where he was living and
arrested, while the baby was taken by the state and put in foster care until
the Broadbents saw her picture online and initiated adoption proceedings.
The
Broadbents are having Mona’s one-year birthday party in a local park (there’s a
mention that this story takes place in San Diego but no recognizable San Diego locations appear) when
Kevin crashes the party and takes out his own camera (a disposable film camera
rather than the digital ones the Broadbents and Cheryl’s parents are using,
which clearly symbolizes the class differences between them) and takes Mona’s
picture. From then on Kevin stalks the Broadbents, and when Tim tries to turn
the tables and stalk Kevin at his house (where he noticed 8” x 10” blow-ups of his photos of Mona on the
wall), Kevin turns that around and gets a restraining order against him. The
Broadbents go to Dr. Ziegler and ask for information on contacting Mona’s birth
mother, and are told there’s nothing he can do because it was a closed adoption
and mom’s privacy needs to be protected — whereupon a furious Tim asks Ziegler
how Kevin Anderson got their address if the information was supposed to be so confidential. Kevin
shows up outside the home of a couple who are friends of the Broadbents, whose
son bites Mona on the forehead during a play session — and a smarmily
apologetic Fay tells the Broadbents on her next visit that she’s going to have
to photograph that and put it in their file.
Fay’s rather smarmy manner — plus
the fact that she’s white on a network where virtually all the legitimate members
of the helping professions are Black — makes us suspicious of her from the
get-go, but about two-thirds of the way through the film the big reversal
comes: Fay, who claimed to have masters’ degrees in both social work and
clinical psychology, is really an impostor; she’s Mona’s biological mother and
she and Kevin are involved in a plot to derail the Broadbents’ chances at
legally adopting Mona so they can take her back for themselves. Kevin breaks
into Dr. Ziegler’s office by disguising himself as a janitor and kills him just
when he’s about to stumble on the real identity of Mona’s birth mother (he’s
Web-surfing on his laptop for the information when he’s croaked), and before
that Kevin showed up at the hospital where the Broadbents were supposed to get
Mona her childhood immunizations, kidnapped Mona but then gave her back when he
was caught (once again he was in disguise, this time wearing the green scrubs
the hospital itself issued to its own staff). This all leads up to a climax in
which Fay locks Kevin in the trunk of their car and sets it afire — though,
like the social worker in the opening scene, Kevin later appears, having made a
miraculous escape that director Rutare doesn’t bother to show us (it’s bad
enough that one of the characters survives
against all odds — the social worker in the opening scene — it’s bad enough
that Rutare and co-writer Nik Frank-Lehrer pull that twice in the same movie!), as all the characters
converge at the mountain cabin of Cheryl’s parents — including the police, there
to arrest Tim and Cheryl and take back Mona because Fay “forgot” to reschedule
the final adoption hearing, gave the judge a highly selective version of the
facts and got him to rule that the adoption was cancelled and therefore the
Broadbents are now guilty of kidnapping if they keep the child.
After a pretty
confusing shoot-out sequence in which it’s not all that clear who’s doing what
to whom — and a horrifying shot in which Cheryl wallops Fay with what appears
to be Mona (it’s actually a baby-sized toy the Broadbents brought with them to
the cabinet, but we don’t realize that until later) and the presumed “baby”
floats down a creek, apparently on its way to drowning (and I found myself
thinking of the Biblical story of King Solomon and the two women who were
fighting over a baby until Solomon threatened to cut the baby in half and give
each woman one of the halves) — the scorecard ends with Kevin, Fay and two cops
dead and the Broadbents taken into custody but with the promise that they will
be released and reunited with Mona (a tag scene shows them winning the adoption
hearing at long last and having her second birthday party in the same park
where Kevin stalked them) once Fay’s fingerprints are found in the system and
the Broadbents’ story checks out — and Fay’s prints are in the system because,
far from being a licensed social worker with two masters’ degrees (as she
claimed), she was a mental patient diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder and schizophenia who
abused her other children and was institutionalized for it. Though Adopting
Terror is a bit melodramatic in
the usual Lifetime manner, and it suffers from their decision to cut back on
the soft-core porn that used to be the highlight of many a Lifetime movie (we
only get a brief, furtive, shadowy glimpse of Kevin and Fay doing it, and
they’re fully clothed), it’s also a quite competent if unoriginal thriller that
gets better as it goes along, the exposition gets out of the way and Rutare’s
direction gets tighter and more effective.
