Flowers in the Attic

Incestuous desires run rampant in the original novel by VC Andrews, but all the movie has to offer is soft-focus innuendo. As fantasy stripped of all its metaphorical trimmings, the sublimely ridiculous plot is more likely to reduce an audience to laughter than to tears. Read full review

Driven by cliches and almost completely ignoring the psychological growth of the children coping with the loss of their parents, it doesn't take long for this to descent into meaningless schlock. Read full review

Flowers in the Attic is a protracted exercise in morbidity, relieved only by moments of ludicrousness. In adapting Andrews' Gothic chiller, writer-director Jeffrey Bloom tries hard to establish an eerie fairy-tale-gone-sour mood, yet fails to work up the credibility necessary to sustain it. The result is a real turnoff. [20 Nov 1987, p.32]

The scary thing about this movie, written and directed for minimum impact by Jeffrey Bloom, is that the book Flowers in the Attic was followed by four other horticultural horror shows, Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns Seeds of Yesterday and Garden of Shadows. There may be bitter fruit to come. Read full review

V. C. Andrews novel of incestuous relationships and confined childhood always has been a superb candidate for a film treatment, but director Jeffrey Bloom has taken this narrative and squeezed the life from it. Performances are as stiff and dreary as the attic these children are imprisoned in. Read full review

Flowers in the Attic is slow, stiff, stupid and senseless, a film utterly lacking in motivation, development and nuance, and further marred by embarrassingly flat acting and directing. Read full review

Screenwriter/director Bloom has produced a bad script and his direction of young actors is even worse. Nothing very explicit survives in the final cut, leaving Andrews' grim ruminations on the horrors of a perverted family life obtuse and undeveloped. Read full review

The story is thick with implausibilities and, like the source, almost unbelievably turgid in the telling. [20 Nov 1987, p.B5]

Would-be horror film has little upstairs. Warped and wilted in the attic. [25 Nov 1987]