Not a great bouquet - Flowers in the Attic

I will never forget the first time I came across V.C. Andrews. I was twelve years old and browsing the bookshelf of my aunt's, and I came across a book whose cover caught my eye.

Yes, it was Flowers in the Attic. 

I pulled the book from the shelf and spent the rest of the afternoon sitting cross legged on the bed, transported to a world of untouchable excess and incest.

Yes, incest.

Looking back now, I was much too young to be reading something like that (where were my parents! Oh, my sullied youth!), but once I finished the book, I was hooked.  I NEEDED to find out what happened to the children after the last page was turned!  Luckily for me, Andrews was a prolific writer, and there was no shortage of books penned that followed the same basic formula of excess, loss, and sex.

I was kept busy for quite awhile.

Eventually I moved on, and my tastes matured.

Many years later, I came across a video cassette in a dusty box at a garage sale.  Nestled in the bottom of the box was a tape, marked twenty five cents.

"Flowers in the Attic"?! I exclaimed to myself.  They made a movie based on a book I so well remembered!

I threw the quarter at the old lady on the porch and ran to my car with my find, eager to get home and pop it in.

An hour and a half later, I was ready to claw my eyes out and stick pins in my ears.

What the hell had they done to the story?!  It was only dimly related to the book! The character's names were the same, and the basic plot was similar, but they left out so much of what made the story a page turner back in the day. 

I'm willing to forgive that though.  I don't hold the story in such high esteem (its about incest for the love of it all, how good can a formula romance about incest be?) that I want things to be exact.  As long as the movie is good!

This wasn't.

Jeffery Bloom did the script treatment, and also directed the film.  Up until this point, Mr. Bloom had been involved with mostly TV stuff.  Well, there was that movie, Blood Beach, but that is a post for another day.

The film opens with a voice over by Cathy, the eldest daughter, played by Kristy Swanson (who has been pretty prolific in television post Flowers).  Whoever the sound guy was, they failed.  It sounds as if she is speaking with the microphone IN her mouth for the entire voice over. 

Then there is the creepy daddy angle.  We are treated to a variety of shots of Cathy in what might be compromising positions with her father.

 We are left to assume that she is the favorite of her father's for a very special reason.  In the background, they always show her mother, looking on with disapproval.

The father dies somehow, and now we have a single mother with four children who must go crawling back to her childhood home, where her overbearing mother waits to welcome her back with a bullwhip.

Yup.  A bullwhip.

On the bus headed to their grandparents house, we are treated to this wonderful bit of dialogue:

Cathy: Mother should have prepared us for something like this.

Chris: What do you mean?

Cathy: She never allowed us to have a dog... or a kitten.

Chris: What's that got to do with anything?

Cathy: Because pets DIE Christopher! And if we had had a pet, we would have learned something about that!


Yes... A dead pet is the perfect training tool for the loss of a parent.  I need to go get a hamster or something.

The premise from this point out is that the kids are locked into a suite in this giant house, with access to an attic, while their mother tries to win back the love of her dying father.

So now we are stuck with four kids to carry the weight of the story.  Okay, I don't mind.  The two little ones, Cory and Carrie (played by Ben Ganger and Lindsay Parkey), are so young that they are fed a line at a time so they don't flub.  This leads to a choppy series of cuts back and forth between the little one uttering a line, and a reaction shot from someone else.  At times it is dizzying.

I'm not going to bore you with the rest of the plot (trust me, you would be bored), so I'm going to hit the high (or.. is it low?) points for you.

• The random groundskeeper/dog handler/handyman.  Why are we treated to random shots of him staring angrily out of a window? 

• Horrible wigs.  I've seen better fare in costume shops, and those are cheaply made.

• The ability of the elder brother, Christopher, to divine that they are being poisoned with arsenic, using an old microscope and some dusty reference books.  Hey, wish I could do that! 

• The kids constant reference to their grandmother as "THE grandmother".  Not really a big deal, but it got on my last nerve the five hundredth time I heard it. (Another robotic Nurse Ratched performance from Louise Fletcher, but what works in One Flew falls flat here.)
  

• The score! Holy hell.  At the beginning of the movie Cathy gets a music box from her father, and we hear the same damn refrain throughout the whole film, with dramatic swells and squealing string sections during such dramatic events as... walking down the stairs.

• At the climax of the movie, Cathy is shoving a broken cookie in her mother's face, yelling "EAT IT MOTHER! EAT THE COOKIE!". This causes her mother to fall to her death.

• Cathy does another mic in the mouth voice over at the end of the movie, talking about how she got a job to put her brother, Christopher (oh mighty arsenic discoverer), through med school.  After being locked in the attic for who knows how long, poisoned, and uneducated, just what was she doing to put him through school? I'm not sure I want to know.

Interesting to note, an alternate adaptation of the novel was penned by renowned horror writer/director Wes Craven back when the book was being shopped, but this was passed over for Bloom's by a studio that was afraid to be up front with the incest and rape present in the original story (innuendo, and faint innuendo at that is all we are treated to). 

I had a chance to read through Craven's script, and I can say I dearly wish it had been produced.  Written just after the first Nightmare on Elm Street, it is full of witticisms and humor, and doesn't shy away from the harder subjects the book tackles.

V.C. Andrews died just before the film was released in 1986, but was reported as saying she was not happy with the finished product.

Neither should you be.