Flowers in the Attic (2014)

Flowers in the Attic is the second film adaptation of writer V. C. Andrews semi-notorious 1979 best seller of the same name. I remember growing up in the 1980's my mother had a copy of this book, and I was kind of fascinated by its unusual two layer cover, which I think along with the title conveyed that there was something kind of forbidden about its contents. Well that forbidden something is incest, yes this is a brother sister love story, and one even creeper then just that.

Set in the 1950's the story concerns the four Dollanganger children, when their beloved father dies unexpectedly their mother takes them to live at the home of her wealthy and estranged parents who the children have never met before. Well the children will never meet there grandpa because he is old and dying and their presence would apparently disturb him, and their mother (truly the stories most interesting character, more on that later, and in this film adaptation played by Heather Graham) wants to cover up their existence so she can charm her way back into her fathers good graces and regain an inheritance.

So the children are kept isolated in the attic of the sprawling southern mansion of their mothers Foxworth kin. In the end they are in that attic literally for years while the mother supposedly charms her father and waits out his illness. Well that's not everything that's going on downstairs, mother succeeds at charming her father and regaining inheritance but only under certain conditions, paramount among these being that she never had children with her late husband, and if it ever turns out that she did she loses everything. You see the late husband was her fathers half brother, so inbreeding, which is one of the reasons why mothers mother, here played by Ellen Burstyn, queen of the crazy old woman roles, treats the children as poorly as she does, though by the same token it turns out that she does have kind of a moral code that she won't violet, and one that is in fact superior to Heather Grahams, which however doesn't say much and more on that later.

Anyway while stuck in the attic the two older Dollanganger children serve as surrogate parents to the two younger ones, twins about 5 or 6ish at the beginning, the older two maybe 13 and 14 at the start. Anyway older children Cathy and Chris make a garden of paper flowers for younger Cory and Carrie, and then isolated and hormonal as they are strike up a romantic and sexual relationship with each other. Yes eww.  Mothers father meanwhile has died and she has remarried to a younger man who has no idea that she has children so eventually mommy Heather decides that she is going to poison her own off spring.

Again the mother, whose name is Corrine is the most interesting and complex character in this piece. She does, at least at first, love her children, however she seems to need the loving attention of a man, her father then second husband, more, and being possessed of few skills beyond her looks feels worried about how she herself will survive without this male attention. When her children become what she perceives to be an ill surmountable threat to her own well being, she decides its time to take them out, in this case with rat poison laced donuts, and she succeeds in part.

I won't say much else about this film, other then to sum up the obvious, its strange and creepy. One of the reasons why I wanted to see this movie is the presence of Kiernan Shipka s Cathy. This young actress is best known as Sally on Mad Men and is an impressive little thespian. She pulls off her role her aplomb as do the other female leads Graham and Burstyn, the few other actors in the film don't have nearly as much to do. This film is "high trash" from the Lifetime Network and leaves one feeling suitably ill. **1/2