The Bad Seed Returns (Front Street Pictures, Beautiful Ghosts Productions, HBO Brasil, Horizon Scripted Television, The Wolper Organization, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched two movies on Lifetime, one pretty bad and one quite good. The pretty bad one was The Bad Seed Returns, a sequel to the 2008 Lifetime remake of the 1956 Warner Bros. flawed classic, also called The Bad Seed, which began life as a 1954 novel by William March and was turned into a successful Broadway play by Maxwell Anderson. The play was controversial because of its assertion that psychopathology could be inherited; the central characters are Christine Penmark, her husband Kenneth,and their daughter Rhoda. Midway through the play Christine realizes that her biological father was a notorious serial killer, and as the death toll around her mounts Christine is horrified to realize that Rhoda is knocking off people she considers “in her way” and she’s inherited the titular “bad seed” from her grandparent. It was the basis for a highly successful film from 1956, with the same leads that had played it on stage – Nancy Kelly as Christine and Patty McCormick as Rhoda – directed by Mervyn LeRoy from a script by John Lee Mahin, who as the writer of the 1941 MGM version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde no doubt knew something about how to depict psychopathology on screen within the limits of the Production Code!). Because of the Production Code, Mahin was forced to tag on an ending in which Rhoda was literally struck by lightning and killed, while Christine recovers from a coma (in Anderson’s play she died and Rhoda lived).

In 2018 Lifetime did a remake of The Bad Seed which made several changes to the story. The titular “bad seed” was changed from Rhoda Penmark to Emma Grossman (McKenna Grace), her mom died either giving birth to her or from lingering complications a year later, and Rob Lowe, who played her dad and also directed, determined to kill Rhoda – oops, I mean “Emma” – first by giving her a cup of poisoned hot chocolate and then, when Emma switches drinks on him so he gets the poison, shooting her – only either a local law enforcer or a would-be good Samaritan shoots and kills him before he can shoot her. In my moviemagg blog post on the Lifetime version (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-bad-seed-front-street-pictures.html), I wrote, “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.”

Alas, The Bad Seed Returns is Lifetime at close to its slovenly worst. It was originally scheduled to air on Memorial Day until a real-life teenage psychopath brought an AR-15 assault rifle to an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas and killed 18 grade-schoolers and two teachers. Lifetime and the director of The Bad Seed Returns, Louise Archambault (whose previous credits are mostly for TV series), agreed that in order to avoid appearing to exploit the real-life horrors for ratings, they’d shelve The Bad Seed Returns until Labor Day. As far as I’m concerned, they could have abandoned it permanently. Mckenna Grace not only starred in the film, she co-wrote its script with Ross Burge (Barbara Marshall also had a co-writing credit, but it may come solely from the re-use of her material from the 2018 The Bad Seed) and she was shown in interview segments during the film boasting how proud she was to be working with a women director and to be working for a network like Lifetime that is committed to increasing opportunities for women filmmakers. All this seems a bit weird, to say the least, as promotion for a film in which the central character is a female monster with no redeeming qualities at all.

Stuck with the template of the original version, especially with what Barbara Marshall and Rob Lowe had done with it in the Lifetime version, Grace, Burge and Marshall had little room to give “Emma” much in the way of character complexity or development. She just moves through the film projecting gooey sweetness while literally offing people under the mask of innocence (in both senses), and somehow much of the original film’s shock value temmed from our shocked realization that this seemingly innocent nine-year-old was a killer. As a teenager (a sophomore in high school), Emma’s youthful-innocence act no longer works; we’re used to teenagers, even non-psychopathic ones, being depicted as manipulative little bastards determined to get their way no matter how many people they have to hurt along the way. Mckenna Grace said in one of her interview segments that audiences would have a sick fascination with Emma and at least on some level would be rooting for her to get away with it, but it didn’t work that way for me. It would take filmmakers at the level of Alfred Hitchcock to pull that off, and Louise Archambault doesn’t even come close.

All we see is Emma Grossman knocking off the other people in her way with a sort of grim determination that simply gets boring after a while. Her victims include Stephanie (I’m guessing Gabriela Bee), a Black girl who threatens to beat out Emma for a dance contest; Kat (Ella Dixon, an actress who turns in such an authoritative performance I’m hoping she has a major career ahead of her), a transferee from another school who knows all about Emma’s past history but makes the classic 1930’s movie mistake of telling Emlma to her face that she’s going to expose her instead of just reporting her to the police without warning her), and at the very end her foster parents, Aunt Angela (Michelle Morgan) and her husband Robert Costa (Benjamin Ayres). She’s already invalided Robert by kicking out the jack under his car when he was outside working on it, and though he survives he ends up in a wheelchair and therefore is a sitting duck for Emma’s machinations. The movie ends with Emma seemingly having got away with everything again – though at least two people, a school principal and Dr. March, a tele-therapist (who in a nice bit of irony carried over from the 2018 The Bad Seed, is played by Patty McCormick, the child villainess from the original 1956 film), know Emma’s secrets and are still alive at the end. Charles resented the fact that Emma didn’t get any sort of comeuppance or accountability for her crimes, and I joked, “That’s so they can do more sequels. They can even have her become President!”