by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched last night’s Lifetime “premiere”
movie, a remake of the 1956 classic The Bad Seed with Rob Lowe as executive producer, director and star. The
Bad Seed, you’ll probably remember, is
about a psychopathic little girl named Rhoda Penmark who’s the granddaughter of
a serial killer and who supposedly inherited grandma’s criminal insanity after
it skipped a generation and did not
afflict her mom. It began life as a novel by William March that got turned into
a hit Broadway play by Maxwell Anderson (oddly the imdb.com page for the remake
does not credit Anderson, though
the final credits of the 2018 film mention both him and John Lee Mahin, who
adapted Anderson’s play for the 1956 film version) and was filmed in 1956 by
director Mervyn LeRoy — returning to his old stomping grounds at Warner Bros.
after nearly two decades at MGM — with the actresses who starred in it on
Broadway, Nancy Kelly as Rhoda’s mom Christine Penmark and child actor Patty
McCormick as the “bad seed” herself. For this version director/star Lowe and
writer Barbara Marshall inexplicably changed Rhoda’s first name to “Emma” and
her last name to “Grossman.” Also, where in the original story Rhoda’s dad had
been a colonel in the U.S. military and wasn’t around much because he was
almost always away on duty (and in the 1956 film he was played by William
Hopper, best known as Paul Drake on the original Perry Mason TV series), in this version Rhoda’s — oops, I mean
“Emma’s” — mom passed away a year or so after Emma’s birth and dad David
Grossman has raised her as a single parent and also built up a thriving
business making and selling designer chairs. (I’m not making this up, you
know.) Emma is a student at St. Alban’s private school, run by African-American
principal Mrs. Ellis (Marci T. House), who predictably becomes yet another one
of the Black women who gets “offed” by the villain early on in a Lifetime
movie. The action kicks off when Emma is disappointed because she expected to
win the school’s annual citizenship medal, presented to the student who most
exemplifies the school’s values of honor, fidelity, trust, helpfulness to
others and all that other good stuff.
Instead she lost it to Milo Curtis (Luke
Roessler, who I suspect is going to be very attractive when he grows up) — in the original it
was a penmanship medal, but what school teaches penmanship anymore? — and so Emma responds by taking Milo out
to the cliffs overlooking a beach near the school (the locale is never
specified in Marshall’s script but at one point there’s a reference to a phone
number in the 914 area code, which would indicate Westchester County in upstate
New York), snatches the medal from him and pushes him over. The school tries to
keep the investigation of Milo’s presumably accidental death in-house instead
of involving the police, but of course Emma is just getting started. She kills
Mrs. Ellis by putting a whole hive of wasps in her car — the hive was on the
Grossmans’ property but just how Emma got it down from the rafters of David’s
original work shed (which he’s kept for sentimental reasons because that’s
where his chair-making business got started even though he now owns two
factories that churn out the things) and into Mrs. Ellis’s car writer Marshall
never bothers to explain. Emma’s next victim is her nanny, Chloë (Sarah
Dugdale), who took the job with the ambition of seducing the rich and single
David and ultimately marrying him (and his money) even though David’s had a
succession of casual girlfriends but has had no interest in settling down with
one permanently since Emma’s mom died. She “offs” Chloë by locking her into
that shed and setting fire to it, knowing that the flammable chemicals inside
(we know there are flammable chemicals inside because David has told Chloë that
because of them she’s not allowed to smoke in the shed) will cause an explosive
fire that will kill her. The sequence is the most chilling scene in the film
but would have been even scarier if director Lowe hadn’t been so explicit about
it — we actually see Chloë’s body
(or a digital simulacrum thereof — in the old days this sort of scene would
have been done by a stunt person in an asbestos suit, but this was pretty
obviously CGI) aflame — and had gone more Lewtonian and dramatized it only with
a long shot of the burning building and Chloë’s screams on the soundtrack.
Ultimately David takes Emma to a deserted mountain cabin — it seems that at
least half of all Lifetime movies these days end in deserted mountain cabins,
though at least this one has cell-phone reception — where he intends to
eliminate Emma’s evil by feeding her hot chocolate laced with a toxic drug,
only Emma catches on, switches cups with him and ultimately she survives and he dies, killed by the cabin’s groundskeeper Brian
(Lorne Cardinal) as he’s about to shoot his daughter. Emma ends up in the
custody of David’s surviving sister Angela, who of course has no idea that cute
little girl is really a psychopathic killer. Along the way, in a vain attempt
to treat her, David takes Emma to a psychiatrist named Dr. March who’s played
by Patty McCormick, the original Rhoda in the 1956 film, who in a bizarre but
predictable in-joke from Barbara Marshall tells Emma, “I used to do exactly the
same things you do when I was your age.” The 1956 The Bad Seed is a great film — at least if you turn it off at the
point where Mahin’s script reached Maxwell Anderson’s original ending
(Christine Penmark tries to do a murder-suicide with Rhoda; Christine dies but
Rhoda lives, and Rhoda’s dad returns from one of his deployments to face the
news that his wife has killed herself, but “at least you still have Rhoda” —
and she comes in, all smiles and gooey sweetness, doing the “basket of kisses …
basket of hugs” that’s a running bit of business between father and daughter in
both versions) and avoid the Production Code-mandated cop-out Mahin had to add
after that (Rhoda goes to the creek where the medal recipient drowned to
retrieve the penmanship medal, a bolt of lightning strikes her down, while her
mom survives after all) and the silly coda LeRoy stuck on after the closing
credits with Nancy Kelly spanking Patty McCormick on screen. The 2018 The
Bad Seed is hardly the movie its
predecessor was, and some of the script changes seem just arbitrary (even the
explanation of the title is changed, probably because modern-day psychologists
have pretty much debunked the idea that criminal tendencies are heritable), but
it’s still a strong enough piece of material that it works, and Lowe’s
direction is suitably atmospheric and better than the Lifetime norm.
