It cracks me up to see what passes for edgy in young-adult literary fare these days. Fights to the death in a dystopian arena? Trysting with vampires? Please. In my day we were reading about sex with your brother, while imprisoned in an attic, where your evil religious grandmother put tar in your hair and whipped your mother, and your siblings got poisoned with arsenic donuts! And we liked it! (Author V.C. Andrews was very big on exclamation points!)
So it stands to reason that Lifetime’s new adaptation of Andrews’ 1979 novel “Flowers in the Attic” would be every bit as overwrought as the purple prose on which it’s based. Is it a good movie? No. Is it enjoyably bad? Yes . . . to a point.
Heather Graham turns her wide-eyed, dim-bulb act up to eleven as the Dollenganger family matriarch, Corinne, who has a breakdown following the death of her beloved husband (and, ahem, half-uncle) and takes her four kids to the home of her wealthy, estranged parents, the Foxworths, to grub for money.
Chris (Mason Dye) and Cathy (Kiernan Shipka), the elder siblings, and Cory (Maxwell Kovach) and Carrie (Ava Telek), the young twins, are spirited up to the dusty top floor of the Foxworth mansion to silently await the moment their mother can get back in her dying father’s good graces — and back into his will. Little do the children know their grandfather doesn’t know they exist — and that their increasingly amoral mother has no intention of giving that secret away before he croaks. Weeks and months drag on as the Dollenganger dolls languish behind the always-drawn curtains.
I was initially skeptical about the casting of Shipka — Sally Draper from “Mad Men” — as the narrator, and ethereal ballerina, Cathy. She strikes me as more of a regular kid than a blonde teen goddess. But Shipka’s a talented actress; you can tell there’s always something going on in her head. And Ellen Burstyn is delightfully terrifying as vengeful grandmother, Olivia — almost surpassing Louise “Cuckoo’s Nest” Fletcher, who played her in the otherwise wan 1987 big-screen version. When she starts in about original sin, pointing a taloned finger at then-innocent Chris and Cathy, you get a little Old Testament shiver.
Despite the seemingly substantial production budget, there are moments of howlingly bad special effects, as when Corinne must take off her blouse to show her children the whip marks on her back. They’re perfectly symmetrical and seem drawn on by lipstick.
But the real problem is the movie’s lack of lust. If you’re going to remake a movie, even a movie of a terribly-written book, fill in what the predecessor lacked. So why not dial up the sex quotient, which is the primary reason anyone picked up the book in the first place?
Spoiler alert: Chris and Cathy, burgeoning hottie teenagers, fall for each other, and end up doing it: “Somehow we ended up on that old mattress — that filthy, smelly, stained mattress that must have known lovers long before this night. And that is where he took me . . . ” At least, that’s the book’s torrid telling of the deed. The Lifetime movie grants you a chaste kiss and then cuts to morning. Huh?
Note to Lifetime execs: Zero viewers will tune in saying to themselves, “Gosh, I hope it’s not too dirty.” Opportunity firmly missed. That said, the network just announced it’ll be making “Petals on the Wind,” the sequel to “Flowers,” which doubles down on the incest and violence. So there’s always hope. After all, as Chris tells his bride-to-be in that book: “Life offers more than one chance, Cathy, you know that.”