by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime movie
was Dark Angel, the second in their
adaptation of V. C. Andrews’ Casteel quintology dealing with the central
character of Heaven Casteel Van Vereen (the bifurcated last name came courtesy
of the adoptive parents who raised her in the first book in the cycle, Heaven, and of course being a male in a V. C. Andrews
novel daddy Cal Van Vereen found Heaven irresistible and seduced her), who for
her senior year in high school is put on a bus to Santa Cruz (though she
actually ends up, not in the California town of that name, but still on the
East Coast in the environs of Boston) to live out the rest of her minority in
the home of her grandmother, Jillian Casteel Tatterton (Kelly Rutherford), and
her husband Tony Tatterton (Jason Priestley, the young hottie of Beverly
Hills, 90210 turned into an imposing
and still attractive middle-aged man). Jillian has it in for Heaven as soon as
she arrives at the Tatterton estate, figuring she’s just a young, ignorant
hillbilly girl who wants to get her hands on the Tatterton fortune. Tony sticks
up for her but makes it clear that if Heaven expects to stay with him and
Jillian she’s going to have to be obedient and give him whatever he wants. At
first we assume that means he has lascivious designs on her himself, but the truth turns out to be
both more sinister and crazier. Tony solemnly instructs Heaven never to go into
the hedge maze on his estate (one night after watching Maze Runner: The
Death Cure it was odd indeed to see
another movie involving a maze and a scared fish-out-of-water teenager
intimidated by it!) or visit the crazy brother he’s hidden out in a cottage at
the other end of the maze.
Given that the first episode described Heaven
reading Jane Eyre in high school, we’re not
surprised that the Tattertons are hiding out a crazy relative in a secret part
of their estate — only it’s not a former wife who really is crazy, but a brother, Troy (Jason Cermak), who’s
attractive, personable and is the source of the Tattertons’ fortune. The
Tattertons own a toy company and it’s Troy who handcrafts the originals for
their line of collectors’ dolls that has made them their money. Heaven and Troy
start an affair — like a typical V. C. Andrews character, she’ll have sex with
any guy who stands over her long enough or just hangs out in her proximity —
and Troy tells Heaven that falling in love with her has pulled him out of his
lifelong depression. Troy proposes marriage to Heaven and gives her an
engagement ring (we get the impression that with his skills as a sculptor he
made it himself), and meanwhile Heaven gets an entrée into an exclusive
all-girls’ private school in Boston for her final year in high school. Her way
is paved by Tony, who’s made a major donation to the school as a veiled but
unmistakable bribe to get his foster daughter in — and Heaven manages to
graduate at the top of her class despite the bitchy antagonism of a stuck-up
blonde who keeps insulting her. Meanwhile, Heaven’s old boyfriend from back
home, Logan Stonewall (James Rittinger, who looks older in this episode even
though he’s the same actor who played him in Heaven), turns up in Boston, and while Heaven sees him
with another woman in a coffeehouse in Boston, it turns out Logan still has the
hots for Heaven despite having broken up with her in episode one when he
realized she was sleeping with Cal. Just after she graduates from that
exclusive prep school Tony bought her way into — though he doesn’t show up for
the ceremony and Heaven is put out about that — she goes back to the mountain
town in the South where she grew up, she crashes her car and Logan rescues her
and takes her home. He makes the obligatory pass (for a V. C. Andrews male) on
her and she seems to be yielding to him, only she calls him “Troy” and she
clearly has the two of them mixed up in her brain (as do we, by the way;
director Paul Shapiro and his cinematographer, who’s unlisted on imdb.com even
though the camera operators are, shoots Jason Cermak and James Rittinger in such a way that they
strongly resemble each other).
When Heaven returns to the Tattinger estate
ready to marry Troy and go to college, Tony drops his bombshell on her,
triggered by her admission that when she arrived at the Tatterton manse she lied about her age, saying she was 18 when she
was really 16. It seems that Tony is Heaven’s biological father: Jillian hired
her daughter — Heaven’s long-dead mom (she died giving birth to Heaven) — as a
maid on the estate, only Tony seduced her (or she him, which is the lame excuse
he gives for their affair),
got her pregnant and therefore Heaven can’t marry Troy since Troy is her uncle.
(“Why not?” I found myself asking. “After all, Siegfried was the product of
brother-sister incest and he got together with his aunt!”) Tony instructs Heaven to break up with
Troy but let him down easily, but instead of telling him the truth Heaven just
says, “I can’t marry you,” without bothering to tell him why, and the stress of
being told off this way leads Troy to commit suicide. (To paraphrase Dorothy
Parker’s marvelous line from the 1937 A Star Is Born, “How do you wire congratulations to the Atlantic
Ocean?”) Only we never see Troy’s body, and after Dark Angel was over Lifetime showed a promo for the next film
in the cycle, Fallen Hearts, which hinted that Troy may still be alive after all. In the middle of
all this there’s a sequence in which Heaven decides to spend her summer
vacation between the end of high school and the start of college looking up her
(half-)siblings — she knows where they are thanks to a private detective Troy
hired to find out — and her sister Fanny has gone through the $10,000 hush
money the reverend who raped her gave her for the right to adopt the resulting
baby (in V. C. Andrewsland rape seems inevitably to result in pregnancy) and is living with a
heavy-set biker type in a trailer. Presumably the two spent the $10,000 on
drugs, though we’re not told this. Heaven’s brother Tom (Matthew Nelson-Mahoud)
is working for a circus owned by his father Luke (Chris William Martin) and
seems more or less content (as content as a V. C. Andrews character ever gets
to be, anyway) even though Heaven upbraids him for living his father’s dreams
instead of his own. The final scene jumps over the four years Heaven spent in college
(much the way Booth Tarkington jumped over George Amberson Minafer’s college
years in The Magnificent Ambersons) and shows her graduating — this time Tony Tatterton is at the ceremony, and so is Logan Stonewall, who
seems to be still in love with her and interested in getting together with her.
Dark Angel was apparently the last
book V. C. Andrews finished personally before her death from breast cancer in
December 1986 — though she’d supposedly begun the next book in the cycle, Fallen
Hearts, before her death.
Andrews’ publisher, not wishing to let her highly lucrative name die along with
its original owner, hired Andrew Neiderman to complete Fallen Hearts and write “new” V. C. Andrews novels from scratch,
including the remaining two items in the Casteel quintology, Gates of
Paradise and Web of Dreams (the last a prequel in which the central character
is Leigh, Heaven’s mother). This is the fourth V. C. Andrews-based movie I’ve
suffered through on Lifetime, and it’s marked by an excellent performance by
Kelly Rutherford as Jillian Casteel Tatterton, the bitchy grande dame who’s also destroying herself on high-class wine.
Somehow Rutherford has managed to figure out a way to bring a V. C. Andrews
character to multidimensional life on screen — a task that eludes the other
actors in this film (except for the one who plays the blonde bitch who torments
Heaven in prep school, who’s also quite good — it’s ironic that in a film based
on a novel written by a woman, the two most interesting female characters are
also the least sympathetic!), who like
their counterparts in Heaven seem midway through the filming just to have given up, realizing
they’re never going to be able to enact these preposterous situations or speak
the ridiculous dialogue (Scarlett Lacey is the credited screenwriter and,
having neither read nor wanted to read the books, I don’t know whether to blame
her or Andrews for the almost literally unspeakable lines!) with anything
approaching credibility. I’m sure Jason Priestley took this role not only for
the money but also hoping it would showcase him and prove he’s more than just
an aging ex-teen idol, but it didn’t work: he plays his whole role in a state
of stentorian monomania, as if he’s a spoiled brat used to getting his own way
and having his orders followed without question. (Maybe he should play Donald
Trump.) I probably wouldn’t have watched Dark Angel if I’d had anything better to do last night, but
there’s a certain haunting quality to the sheer preposterousness of it all and
Andrews’ either inability or disinterest in creating multidimensional
characters (except for Jillian) that may lead me to turn on Fallen Hearts after all.
