I only saw the last hour of Flowers in the Attic - having read the book as a teenager, I found the narrative entertaining at the time but slightly over-dramatic as I got older, although it is a decent novel for the teenager/young adult market. I have, however, also read less than flattering reviews of this film and now I can see why. It reduced the storyline a little too much - the drama is never really at any sort of peak. You feel as though they filmed a longer version but cut out the most dramatic turning points to fit the estimated running time. Strange choice too, to feature the wedding considering that - at the point in the novel where Chris revealed the fate of his grandfather - all they really wanted to do was get away. The last thing the siblings wanted in the book (and, I thought, in the film - up to this moment) was to be around their mother.
Chris is oddly cast - he talks like a teenager but he looks about 27, I presume they substituted him calling her "Momma" for "Mom" because the first name sounds too old-fashioned, given the date when the film was released but it doesn't give the film any sense of time. Cathy looks very "80s" in the second hour - she could almost look like the girl in the Take On Me video by a-Ha with her hair cut (at least in the earlier part of the film, her hair is a convincing 1950s type of style) but she has got that self-preservation ethos and manner of asking the very questions that a teenager would ask and which a mother like hers wouldn't want to have to answer, so the personality is captured quite well. She seems a bit whiny at times, but then, so was the Cathy in the book.
The grandmother's dresses are very like they are described in the book and they have got some continuity with Carrie's hair getting longer and longer.The twins aren't badly cast, but the mother seems moronic (I know she was in the book, but she is always talking in this breathy "excited whisper", although her tantrums when the kids get fed up with her show at least one other emotion and she is a very "spoilt brat" - very like in the book, in fact). The wardrobe department must have had a massive stock of white material that they had to use up, though. In the book Cathy is always describing her mother as wearing richly coloured clothes yet in the evening ball or dance (or whatever it was) scene, all the extras are in white - it seems odd.
The "dramatic" bits seemed too obvious - darkness, people hiding behind doors, thumping piano music that somebody obviously equated with "scary". The nearly-escape scene contains every cliché going - guard dogs barking, man with a gun on patrol (he was slow to react, given that the dogs had been barking for about five minutes), rope breaking. It's almost Sylvester and Tweety Pie.
The vocal, semi-Gregorian chanting gets annoying - I think it's supposed to be creepy. The shot of Cory's grave being filled in looked convincing enough to start with but the idea of a further three graves being dug out and waiting to be filled seems contrived and frankly stupid - if you're going to kill somebody (especially if you're trying to keep it a secret) I don't think most intelligent killers would have ready-made graves on standby to be filled in as the body count rose. We are then supposed to believe that Corrine's new husband had no idea that she had children with her first husband! (In the book this is true.) Had he gone for a walk around the estate shown in this film, he couldn't have failed to note three gaping holes in the earth! Overall, I suppose the film makers made an attempt at telling the story, but they didn't seem to have a clear vision of its purpose. Too dramatic and eerie in parts for little children yet the more adult themes from the novel (obviously, the incestuous relationship between Chris and Cathy, and the violent beatings and/or whippings inflicted on Corrine Foxworth and her children - which are, to my mind, memorable events from the original novel) are ignored so completely that it is becomes just another "dysfunctional family" film.
The real problem, though, is that you can't effectively dramatise Flowers In The Attic in the two-hour time frame of the average film. You need a miniseries for that - perhaps the film makers recognised this here and that was why they cut out so much of the content?
Chris is oddly cast - he talks like a teenager but he looks about 27, I presume they substituted him calling her "Momma" for "Mom" because the first name sounds too old-fashioned, given the date when the film was released but it doesn't give the film any sense of time. Cathy looks very "80s" in the second hour - she could almost look like the girl in the Take On Me video by a-Ha with her hair cut (at least in the earlier part of the film, her hair is a convincing 1950s type of style) but she has got that self-preservation ethos and manner of asking the very questions that a teenager would ask and which a mother like hers wouldn't want to have to answer, so the personality is captured quite well. She seems a bit whiny at times, but then, so was the Cathy in the book.
The grandmother's dresses are very like they are described in the book and they have got some continuity with Carrie's hair getting longer and longer.The twins aren't badly cast, but the mother seems moronic (I know she was in the book, but she is always talking in this breathy "excited whisper", although her tantrums when the kids get fed up with her show at least one other emotion and she is a very "spoilt brat" - very like in the book, in fact). The wardrobe department must have had a massive stock of white material that they had to use up, though. In the book Cathy is always describing her mother as wearing richly coloured clothes yet in the evening ball or dance (or whatever it was) scene, all the extras are in white - it seems odd.
The "dramatic" bits seemed too obvious - darkness, people hiding behind doors, thumping piano music that somebody obviously equated with "scary". The nearly-escape scene contains every cliché going - guard dogs barking, man with a gun on patrol (he was slow to react, given that the dogs had been barking for about five minutes), rope breaking. It's almost Sylvester and Tweety Pie.
The vocal, semi-Gregorian chanting gets annoying - I think it's supposed to be creepy. The shot of Cory's grave being filled in looked convincing enough to start with but the idea of a further three graves being dug out and waiting to be filled seems contrived and frankly stupid - if you're going to kill somebody (especially if you're trying to keep it a secret) I don't think most intelligent killers would have ready-made graves on standby to be filled in as the body count rose. We are then supposed to believe that Corrine's new husband had no idea that she had children with her first husband! (In the book this is true.) Had he gone for a walk around the estate shown in this film, he couldn't have failed to note three gaping holes in the earth! Overall, I suppose the film makers made an attempt at telling the story, but they didn't seem to have a clear vision of its purpose. Too dramatic and eerie in parts for little children yet the more adult themes from the novel (obviously, the incestuous relationship between Chris and Cathy, and the violent beatings and/or whippings inflicted on Corrine Foxworth and her children - which are, to my mind, memorable events from the original novel) are ignored so completely that it is becomes just another "dysfunctional family" film.
The real problem, though, is that you can't effectively dramatise Flowers In The Attic in the two-hour time frame of the average film. You need a miniseries for that - perhaps the film makers recognised this here and that was why they cut out so much of the content?
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