So, I currently have a subscription to Shudder, and I go through their movie catalog from time to time to put movies on my watchlist that I may want to check out better. I have a large “must see” movie poster in my office with a few thousand titles on it, and I”m working on seeing most of them. Is Flowers in the Attic on that poster? I don’t recall. The title was vaguely familiar, so I opted to check it out and see for myself.
After seeing it, I have some questions. For starters, since Shudder is a horror service, is Flowers in the Attic even a horror movie?
The movie opens with the four Dollanganger children happily greeting their father as he comes home from some kind of business trip. Oldest daughter Cathy (Kristy Swanson) narrates that they were all happy, and she was her daddy’s favorite. As for the rest of the kids, there is a teenage brother named Chris, and two very young twins, Cory and Carrie. Things go bad when their father dies under mysterious circumstances and, as the family goes broke, their mother Corrinne (Victoria Tennant) bites the bullet and takes the family to her wealthy parents’ house. Once there, Corrinne’s mother (Louise Fletcher) locks the kids up in a room with very strict rules about when they can speak or even acknowledge her. The Grandmother claims Corinne had married her uncle and the children, as products of incest, were personally abhorrent to her as a religious woman. She then spends a good deal of time punishing the children severely while accusing Cathy and Chris of also being incestuous.
By the by, if you think it’s kinda messed up that she would assume Chris and Cathy are incestuous but still lock all four kids in the same room and flip out when she finds the two older kids engaged in conversation while Cathy takes a bath, the one moment I thought might have worked was when Chris actually points this out.
So yeah, this movie is…bad. Really bad. Tremendously bad. MST3K-level bad. It’s melodramatic, with bad performances from the entire cast, including Oscar-winner Fletcher, and a downright laughable (at best) plot. It plays like a really bad soap opera. Now, it is based on a book by author V.C. Andrews often described as “trashy,” but it’s still just not even remotely a good movie. And really, is this a horror movie? I don’t see how. It’s more like a bad melodrama with pearl-clutching morality tossed in. Were the children really products of incest? If they were, Corinne’s uncle sure looked to be about the same age as her, and the kids just take their grandmother’s pronouncement at face value. As for Corinne’s father, we don’t see much of him and have no idea what he did and didn’t know, so what his thoughts might have been on having grandkids doesn’t come out, and that strikes me as something of a wasted opportunity.
Really, I don’t say this often because I can usually find something redeemable in even the dumbest flicks, but this movie sucked.
Grade: F
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