Lifetime’s “premiere” last night was of a film called Heaven, actually listed as V. C. Andrews’ Heaven, part of their “Book to Screen” series which began with an adaptation of a genuine literary classic (Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, carefully reworked by Tracy McMillan into Pride and Prejudice Atlanta, setting Austen’s tale amongst the modern-day Black 1-percenters of Atlanta) and has spiraled downhill from there to films based on books by writers who have little more in common with Austen than their gender. V. C. Andrews (she got her pseudonym by using her real last name but flipping her first and middle initials; she was originally Cleo Virginia Andrews) was a Gothic horror writer who was born June 6, 1923 in Portsmouth, Virginia but didn’t take up novel writing until she was nearly 50. During the space of a little over a decade — from the publication of her first book, Flowers in the Attic, a smash best-seller in 1975, until her death from breast cancer in 1986 — Andrews cranked out at least one book a year and left ideas and outlines for other novels which were completed (or quite likely written from scratch) by Andrew Neiderman, who was assigned by her publisher to keep the “V. C. Andrews” name and oeuvre alive even after its original owner was dead. Andrews’ (and Neiderman’s) works typically appeared in a cycle of five novels about the same family: the first four telling a multigenerational saga and the fifth reaching back to give the backstory of the original characters and their parents. Flowers in the Attic was the first such sequence and apparently the only one Andrews completed before her death; it told the story of the Dollangangers, and in particular a brother and sister who were locked in the attic of a crumbling Southern mansion and who ended up in an incestuous relationship simply because as they came to sexual maturity there was no one else available. Andrews followed this up with a quintology about the Casteels, a backwoods Southern family of a father and five kids, the first one born of a mother named Angel who died giving birth to a baby girl whom dad named Heaven.
At the start of Heaven Heaven Casteel (Annalise Basso) is in high school and has a more or less serious boyfriend, Logan Stonewall (James Rittinger, a nice piece of masculine eye candy), but everyone else in her school shuns her because the Casteels have a reputation, earned or otherwise, as total sluts. Anyway, daddy Casteel parcels out his two teenage daughters to other families — Heaven’s sister to a reverend who rapes her and gets her “with child” on the first night she lives with him and his wife, and Heaven herself to Kitty Dennison (Julie Benz) — I had the impression she was supposed to be Heaven’s aunt, but Andrews was not that great a writer in terms of sorting out the family relationships between her characters — who’s working as a waitress to support herself and her wastrel husband Cal (Chris McNally), an aspiring novelist who’s endlessly working on a manuscript we know he’ll never finish (and which would probably not be any good if he did, though maybe he could get a literary agent who could sell it to a publisher with the pitch, “It’s just like V. C. Andrews!”). The time frame of the story appears to be the mid-1960’s, judging from the blue Ford Falcon convertible Cal Dennison drives and the large manual typewriter on which he writes his novel. Heaven encounters the ultra-strict parental rules of Kitty and Cal; at one point Kitty instructs Cal to whip Heaven for some infraction of her vague but severe house rules, though Cal saves her by whipping the kitchen counter instead and instructing Heaven to scream out as if she were really being flogged. Also Kitty decides, once she learns Heaven has sneaked out of their house (which she literally never wants Heaven to leave, claiming that the air outside is “dirty”) to see her ex-boyfriend Logan (ya remember her ex-boyfriend Logan?), to clean the dirt and sluttiness out of her literally by pitching her into a bathtub filled with boiling water. Cal rescues Heaven from Kitty’s attempt to scald her, and just then cancer cells appear as a deus ex machina to take Kitty out of the action[1] and leave Heaven alone with Cal, who like a typical V. C. Andrews character has managed to seduce her simply by being the only other person there.
Only Heaven ends up with an even stricter and crazier foster mom, Grace (Ingrid Tesch), and when Logan learns that Heaven has had sex with Cal he decides that everyone was right all along — she’s a slut — so he dumps her. The film was followed by a promo for the immediate sequel, Dark Angel (apparently the only other book in the cycle written by Andrews herself; the third, Fallen Hearts, was apparently started by Andrews and finished by Neiderman, while the last two, Gates of Paradise and Web of Dreams, were written by Neiderman and only, according to their title pages, “inspired” by Andrews), in which she takes a bus from Georgia to Santa Cruz (presumably the one in California), where she’s going to meet with more people out to exploit her, emotionally, sexually or both, including a paterfamilias in a big mansion — the dad is played by Jason Priestley, and judging from the clips he’s probably sexier now than in his teen-idol days, but the lascivious eyes we saw him displaying in the promo indicate that, like a typical V. C. Andrews male, his interest in the put-upon heroine is far more sexual than paternal. He’s supposedly also got a crazy brother locked up in a cottage on his estate that’s reachable only by a maze which he warns Heaven never to enter — which, of course, she does. The fact that in Heaven Heaven receives a copy of Jane Eyre as a present from Cal seems to be prefiguring this plot line — though it’s also an ill-advised move on the part of V. C. Andrews and/or her adapters (screenwriter Scarlet Lacey and director Paul Shapiro) to reference a great Gothic book by a woman writer in their version of a terrible one. Lacey, Shapiro and their cast seem to have set out to do the best they could with the material they had, though not only couldn’t I help but wish that they had done an updated version of Jane Eyre along the lines of Pride and Prejudice Atlanta (indeed, Charlotte Bronté’s story would probably have been easier to transmute into modern times than Austen’s was!),
I got the feeling along the time Grace entered the action that the actors had simply given up. They knew they couldn’t utter Andrews’ wretched dialogue as if it were the speech of real people, so they seemed about midway through the film to have simply stopped trying. Charles had a comment afterwards that the problem with V. C. Andrews is that her villains never let up — they start at 11 and go up from there, and they never have a moment of respite in which they kick off their shoes and just behave like normal people. I keep flashing back to the documentary Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary, an extended interview with Hitler’s secretary, Traudl Junge, who told us what a wonderful guy Hitler was and an easygoing boss to work for when he wasn’t doing things like starting World War II and ordering the Holocaust — and a great writer, or even a not great but at least sensible one, knows enough to endow a fictional villain with such human qualities and bits of lovability so the evil they do will be that much more frightening. (But then what would a future historical novelist do with Donald Trump, who isn’t as far-reachingly evil as Hitler but doesn’t seem to have any of his warm and lovable qualities either?) Andrews also is an all too typical modern writer (even though her heyday was 40 years ago) in that, aside from her much put-upon heroine, she doesn’t really give us anyone to like: all the people around Heaven seem committed to exploiting her in one way or another — if this film had been made in the silent era it would probably have been called The Horrors of Heaven — and when she moves from one situation to another the only suspense seems to be how her next set of foster parents will exploit her and whether they’ll be content merely to torture her or they’ll want to rape her as well.
[1] — By a macabre coincidence, Kitty dies of breast
cancer — also the disease that killed V. C. Andrews for real.
