Daddy’s Perfect Little Girl (NB Thrilling Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was of something called Daddy’s Perfect Little Girl, a pretty blatant knock-off of The Bad Seed (which Lifetime recently remade in 2018 with Rob Lowe both directing and starring as the “bad seed”’s father – I just re-read my moviemagg post on that film at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-bad-seed-front-street-pictures.html and found I’d liked it better back then than I remember it as being now) which Lifetime had also ripped off previously as Mommy’s Little Girl and Mommy’s Little Princess, both of them produced – as was this one – by a company called NB Thrilling Films. Though it was written by Melissa Cassera instead of Christine Conradt, who wrote the “Mommy’s … ” movies referenced above, it was directed by Conradt’s long-time collaborator Curtis James Crawford, who can count one directorial triumph: he gets a marvelous little-girl-psycho performance out of Hattie Kragten rivaling the one Patty McCormick gave in the 1956 film of The Bad Seed.

This time the demented little-girl killer is called Ella Chambers (Hattie Kragten) and she’s the adopted daughter of advertising-agency owner Nolan Chambers (Matt Wells, at least a bit better-looking than the usual tall, lanky, sandy-haired guys Lifetime usually casts as the innocent good-guy husbands and fathers). Ella became available for adoption in the first place because her biological mother was killed by an abusive boyfriend – writer Cassera doesn’t come right out and say that the no-good boyfriend was Ella’s biological father, but it makes sense to read the plot that way and it gives Ella the same sort of “bad seed” the original Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed got from being the granddaughter of a serial killer. Ella has really been up against it all her life: not only was her mom killed with her watching (did Cassera get this from the real-life story of country singer Shelby Lynne, whose dad killed her mom with her watching?), but within a year after Nolan adopted her, his wife got diagnosed with terminal cancer and died just as she and Ella were starting to bond as mother and daughter. Since then Nolan has been raising Ella as a single father, with help from his housekeeper Larissa Anderson (Sochi Fried), and Ella seems to have only one friend, a well-to-do Black girl named Kinsley Winters (Ajanae Stephenson).

Dad lands a deal for the woman who turns out to be Ella’s favorite actress, TV star Juliette Lee (Andrea Pavlovic), who appears regularly on a series called Twisted Pretty in which she plays a woman who is out on a revenge quest and in each episode kills people she thinks are in her way. Apparently the scripts for Twisted Pretty are full of what the old Motion Picture Production Code used to ban as “imitable details of crime,” and Ella carefully studies the show and the ways Juliette’s character kills people to figure out how she can do so in real life. Nolan visits Juliette on the set of the commercial she agreed to film for his agency, and brings Ella along. Ella gets upset because Juliette won’t pose for a selfie with her, which Kinsley had demanded to see so Ella could prove to her that she really met the star. Instead Juliette posed for one with Zander Grant (Joshua Obra), son of Cecily, an attractive Black woman on Juliette’s staff. (There’s a bit of confusion about Cecily’s and Zander’s last name: it’s “Grant” in the film’s dialogue, “Gant” on the sign on a bicycle reserved for Zander on a camping trip the characters take, and “Gray” on imdb.com.) Nolan and Cecily meet on the set of the commercial and are instantly smitten – provoking Ella to fits of jealous rage as the two start dating. Ella gets so upset whenever anything doesn’t go the way she wants that she starts by destroying things – including an elaborate glass lighting fixture on the set of the commercial – and soon moves up to killing people.

Her first target is Albert Foster (Paul Amato), a middle-aged schlub and a neighbor of Nolan’s who’s got tired of Emma cutting across his property on her way to see her friend Kinsley – whom she breaks off with when Kinsley gives her a hard time over not getting the selfie with Juliette Lee Kinsley had demanded as proof Ella really met the star. Albert is up on a ladder cleaning the grout from his gutters when Ella kicks the ladder out from under him, he falls and dies – though his body isn’t discovered until the next day, even though it’s lying in plain sight. Needless to say, the cops and everybody else accept this as an “accident.” Ella’s next target is the mother of Nolan’s business partner, Fay Broward (Heather Mitchell), whom she resents because Fay unexpectedly had to fly to New York to settle mom in a new house the weekend Ella was counting on going on an “adventure camp” weekend with Nolan – meaning Nolan will have to stay behind and cover the agency’s meetings since Fay won’t be in town. So Ella decides to off Fay’s mom by spiking her yogurt with detergent pods – she even looks it up online to determine what dose will be lethal, and she shoplifts enough pods for the fatal dose, only Albert caught her and that’s what led her to the final decision to get rid of him first. Fay’s mom eats the spiked yogurt but fortunately Fay finds her and rescues her, calling 911 in time to have her stomach pumped and her life saved, but she calls the New York trip off – only Ella still can’t go to the adventure camp with her dad because in the meantime he’s already canceled their reservations and the camp is solidly booked both that weekend and the next.

Cecily says she can get them there anyway – she knows someone who works there and scores them four tickets as long as they stay off-site instead of at the camp itself. Nolan thanks Cecily and invites her to come along and bring Zander to use the other two tickets; Cecily at first sensibly backs off, knowing that Ella really wanted this trip as a “just the two of us” bonding experience with her adoptive dad, but Nolan insists and the four of them set off together. Then Ella decides to knock off Zander by cutting the brake cable of his bike just as he’s about to go on “Level Five,” the longest and most challenging of the camp’s five mountain bike trails – and Zander duly crashes his bike when he realizes it has no brakes and ends up alive but in the hospital and looking forward to spending the next six weeks on crutches, which jeopardizes the basketball scholarship he was counting on to go to college. Why Zander didn’t check out the brakes before he went on the mountain trail is a mystery – all he would have needed to do is squeeze the brake levers and look to make sure they correctly gripped the wheels. Also a mystery is why nobody inspects the wreckage of Zander’s bike, which would have revealed that the brakes didn’t just fail: the cord between the lever and the brake itself was deliberately cut. Another thing that should have given Ella away is the succession of text messages she sends to Juliette Lee, which if they’d come from an adult would have had her staff reporting them to the police and searching high and low for the crazy stalker sending them.

But then it seems throughout this movie as if Ella has everybody so snowed with her cute-little-girl act and her tales of previous woe they don’t bother to suspect her no matter how obvious the evidence seems to us – until the very end, when Cecily catches on to her and she’s ultimately apprehended. Since she’s only 12, instead of being sent to an adult prison she ends up in some sort of group home that looks like a quite nice and pleasant summer school, in which she proudly finishes an art therapy project and does a voice-over about how much she’s looking forward to showing it to dad. Aside from Hattie Kragten’s remarkable performance as Ella, Daddy’s Perfect Little Girl is pretty much by-the-numbers Lifetime, with reasonably effective direction by Curtis Crawford (who’s done storyboards for some animated TV series from the 1980’s and 1990’s but whose live-action directorial credits seem all to be for Lifetime or other outlets seeking similar stories) and a script by Melissa Cassera that had promise but also had way too many loose ends to be credible.