After Family Portraits Lifetime showed a movie called Killer Grandma — which when I first saw it in the TV listings I thought I’d already seen. It turned out I was confusing it with Psycho Granny, though the premises are similar and Lifetime’s program suppliers, Reel One Entertainment and Fell to Earth Films, shot this one under the working title Killer In-Law (by coincidence — or maybe not — Lifetime also aired a film called Psycho In-Law and another called Psycho Brother-in-Law). The film opens with a prologue in which a woman, Yvonne Hutcherson (Jodi Lynn Thomas) in a house with a pool is alone except for her two kids, seven-year-old Tom (O’Neill Monahan) and four-year-old Meghan (unidentified in the imdb.com cast list, though I suspect the child actress cast later as her niece — more on that later — also played her). Yvonne had solemnly instructed her kids not to play in the pool, but Meghan dared her brother to go in with her, and when she started drowning Tom was too panicked and too immature to save her, while Mom arrived too late. The film flashes forward almost 20 years to the Westlake mental institution, where Yvonne — now older and played by Nana Visitor, with severely short grey hair and a rail-thin bod that has obviously escaped the usual, shall we say, “expansion” that comes with age — is being given a discharge interview by her therapist, a tall Black woman with a similarly short haircut, who reminds her (and tells us) that she was well enough to leave two years earlier but she decided to stay on at Westlake and help her fellow patients, sort of like Jane Eyre becoming a teacher at Lowood School after she graduated there. Yvonne makes a bee-line to the city where her son Tom, now an adult and using the name “Ferriday” (why do the mother and son have different last names? Maybe we were supposed to believe he was adopted after his dad had previously died and his mom went crazy over the death of his sister, and “Ferriday” is his adoptive parents’ name — though the script by Nick Barzini and the film’s director, Danny J. Boyle,[1] doesn’t say this or give us any clue as to how or where Tom spent the rest of his childhood), is living with his wife Melissa (Kelly Sullivan, top-billed) and their daughter Annie (Violet Hicks).
Yvonne is determined to ingratiate herself with her son and daughter-in-law and worm their way into their house so she can ultimately kidnap Annie and use her to replace her late daughter Meghan, whose death she blames on Tom. We then find out what these people do for a living — Tom is an architect who has just got a potentially career-making commission from the city where they’re living to design a new public day-care center (and there’s a marvelously chilling scene in which he’s at his worktable working with his scale models of what the buildings in the center will look like, and mom ridicules him for still playing with toys), and Melissa makes handcrafted jewelry and sells it on line. She’s got a number of helpers, including her business partner Courtney Little (Jessica Blackmore) — who’s shown shooting pictures of her for the business’s Web site — and Yvonne’s most direct competitor, nanny Kendra (Jesi Mandagaran). Melissa loves Kendra and trusts her totally with Annie, but that’s no problem: showing surprisingly good hacker skills for someone who was in a mental institution during most of the development of the Internet, Yvonne discovers Kendra’s address online, goes to her home and clubs her to death. Then Yvonne talks the Ferridays in to letting her stay with them and look after Annie during the day while they’re both too busy to do so (though, mind you, they’re both working from home). At first, in the manner of the usual Lifetime mother-in-law/sister/brother/uncle/aunt/nanny/neighbor/teacher/counselor/gardener/maintenance man/whatever from hell, Yvonne couldn’t be more ingratiating, but her “cover” starts to slip when, out alone with Annie, Yvonne buys her dinner at a fast-food outlet in defiance of Melissa’s edict that she wants her daughter to eat healthily. Then Yvonne is looking after Annie and Courtney’s daughter Penelope (Milan Aguilera), who are playing by — you guessed it — the pool (it seems as if Tom either never left the house where he grew up or he found another one remarkably like it). Only Yvonne has a freak-out, bursts out of the kitchen with a knife in her hand, threatens the kids if they play in the pool, and for good measure calls Annie “Meghan.” Courtney, who’s there to look after her daughter, captures all this on video with her digital camera and uploads it onto her computer, then threatens to send Melissa the clip to convince her that her mother-in-law is really not a fit person to be left around their daughters — only, though she’s white, she meets the fate usually reserved for the heroine’s African-American best friend who stumbles onto the truth about the villain’s plot but gets killed for her pains.
The finale occurs at the surprisingly large and nice house Yvonne has somehow acquired for herself and outfitted so she and Annie can live there together, just the two of them, as soon as she dispatches those inconvenient parents of hers. Yvonne has already knocked Tom down a flight of stairs, though he ends up hospitalized instead of dead, and at the end she picks Annie up from school and kidnaps her, taking her to the house she’s outfitted with a room for Annie that’s an exact duplicate of Meghan’s, down to Meghan’s old toys which Yvonne carefully preserved. She’s even had Annie wear an old black dress of Meghan’s, with a large white collar that when she has it on makes her look like a cross between a Salem witch and what the kid from The Omen would have looked like if he’d been a girl instead of a boy. Only Melissa figures out where Yvonne has taken Annie and goes to confront her. Things don’t go so well for Our Heroine at first — Yvonne surprises her and once again has a large kitchen knife in her hand with which she attacks Melissa and apparently draws blood — but at the end Melissa overpowers Yvonne, stabs her in the chest with her own knife, and gets away with Annie. At the end Melissa, Tom and Annie are reunited as a family — but Yvonne is also still alive, back at the mental hospital and still being looked after by the same African-American therapist who was so spectacularly unsuccessful with her in the first time. Oh, and did I tell you that along the way Yvonne has revealed to both Tom and Meghan that Tom’s dad didn’t just die in an “accident,” but she killed him with a blow to the back of the head with a baseball bat just as he was getting ready to leave her?
The direction by the “other” Danny Boyle and the script he wrote with Nick Barzini are coherent enough we’re not supposed to suspend disbelief through the wild coincidences and happenstances that drove the plot of Family Pictures, but what really saves Killer Grandma and gives it whatever entertainment value it has is the superb performance by Nana Visitor in the title role. One imdb.com reviewer compared her to Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in the horror films they made in the early 1960’s (jointly in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and severally, Davis in Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte and Crawford in Strait-Jacket), and the praise is high but well earned even though tall, leggy, rail-thin Visitor looks less like Davis or Crawford than Anthony Perkins in the drag scenes in Psycho. She’s totally in command of her role, ingratiating and relatively normal when the script calls for her to appear so and vividly controlling in the Big Moments — and at the same time she doesn’t lapse into the raving madness so many actors of both (mainstream) genders fall into when called on to impersonate psychos. (I find from her list of previous credits that Visitor was in one of my all-time favorite Lifetime movies, Mini’s First Time from 2006, though in my comments on it I didn’t mention her role as the school principal in that delightful black comedy about a teenage girl who seduces her stepfather, then frames him for the murder of her mom and ends up as her high-school class’s valedictorian by arranging an “accident” for the boy who was supposed to have that honor.) She’s been on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and most of her credits are on series TV, but she is certainly an electrifying screen presence here and I have to give special acknowledgment to anyone who’d name her son after the great jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt!
[1] — Obviously using his middle initial so he doesn’t get
confused with the other Danny
Boyle, the Academy Award-winning director of Trainspotting, Slumdog
Millionaire, Steve Jobs and the
recently released Yesterday, an
odd fantasy in which only one person in the world remembers the Beatles.
