Flowers in the Attic

Description

Dreams of an inheritance turn into a nightmare for four innocent children who are locked in the deserted north wing of the family mansion, beaten by a vicious grandmother and tormented by a menacing caretaker.
Item Type: DVD Movie
Item Rating: NR
Street Date: 04/24/01
Wide Screen: yes
Director Cut: no
Special Edition: no
Language: ENGLISH
Foreign Film: noSubtitles: no
Dubbed: no
Full Frame: no
Re-Release: no
Packaging: Sleeve
The classic teen novel of adolescent torment and forbidden love gets brought to the screen. When the father of four beautiful blond children is suddenly killed, their mother (Victoria Tennant, L.A. Story) takes them to the family home she fled 17 years earlier. Their fierce and frightening grandmother (Louise Fletcher, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest) locks them in an upstairs room, from which the only escape is into the cluttered and cobwebbed attic. The children’s isolation gets more and more extreme as their mother abandons them, finally even slowly poisoning them to gain her father’s inheritance. Sadly, the movie shies away from what made Flowers in the Attic such a hugely popular book–namely, the incestuous sex that began between the two older children, Cathy (Kristy Swanson, the movie version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Chris (Jeb Stuart Adams). Instead, the movie insinuates incestuous longing in all directions: Cathy’s father brings her special presents before he dies, Chris scrubs Cathy’s back in the tub, Chris has a noticeably stronger attachment to their mother than Cathy does–not to mention that the grandmother whips the half-naked mother in front of the grandfather. Fletcher brings a bit of bite to her role, and the movie occasionally rises to absurdly lurid zest. –Bret Fetzer