Flowers in the Attic

A sharper creepy TV movie.

If you dwell too much on the plot, you’ll fall into a chasm of disbelief.... Flowers doesn’t look like a Lifetime film, and that’s a compliment. The production moves at a brisk pace, and unlike the children’s predicament, never feels claustrophobic.

The whole enterprise is alternately laughable and affecting without committing the eighth deadly sin of being boring.

Perhaps, because it was unwilling to risk becoming camp, this Flowers can’t achieve the necessary passion, either--Corinne’s viciousness is lost in the shuffle, and volatile Cathy and confused Christopher remain sketches of real characters, whose love never becomes the lifelong connection that takes them by surprise and desperately rushes them toward freedom.

Despite the seemingly substantial production budget, there are moments of howlingly bad special effects.... But the real problem is the movie’s lack of lust.

It does what it sets out to do: that is, adapt the book faithfully and still make an entertaining film.

This tale of a twisted family’s misguided quest for love and money is still creepy and atmospheric enough to make for pulpy television fun.

All the actors are spot-on, even ones who have just a few scenes. It's a pity Kayla Alpert's script and Deborah Chow's direction don't do their collaborators justice.

Chow’s flat direction does little to elevate the action beyond the level of staged reading. It’s hard to fault the actors, although Graham seems unfortunately miscast in a role that requires a degree of coldblooded cunning she’s simply too sweet to pull off. Shipka radiates natural intelligence and poise.

The performances are fine.... As a Lifetime Television Event--a sanctioned airing, projected into the living room, of some grown-up's version of Flowers in the Attic--that context [of the book itself being contraband] is gone. Completely. And so is most of Flowers’ strange, strange magic.

Flowers in the Attic plays it safe and a bit boring. This is material that screams for a campy touch, but director Deborah Chow and teleplay writer Kayla Alpert tell the tale with mostly straight faces.

Flower's isn't a guilty pleasure, it's purgatory. [17 Jan 2014, p.63]

V.C. Andrews’ popular and creepy 1979 novel “Flowers in the Attic” gets no favors from the scriptwriters in this latest adaptation. The reason to watch, even when you’re saying “Yeah, right” to what’s happening on the screen, is actors Ellen Burstyn, Mason Dye and Kiernan Shipka.

Lifetime goes there, then backs away from the issue immediately, making for some scenes that add nothing to the story but brief bouts of nausea.

Teen sexuality is tricky subject material. Teen sexuality manifested in incest is trickier still. And the new Lifetime movie is not up to the job.

Graham is so weirdly robotic as Corrine Dollanganger that it’s almost as if she’s doing an impression of an actress in a Lifetime movie.... Burstyn's scenes are compelling, even though she doesn’t have much to work with. The movie gets hard to watch when we’re stuck in the attic with siblings Cathy, Chris, Cory, and Cary.

The film, adapted by Kayla Alpert and directed by Deborah Chow, captures only the faintest shadow of the book’s tone and ambience, so it’s left with the story, and that’s not a good situation.

I'm not quite sure why this needed to be remade, but Lifetime's curiously inert adaptation of V.C. Andrews' twisted Gothic Flowers in the Attic at least gives Ellen Burstyn the opportunity to display her florid take on a classic Nurse Ratched/Baby Jane psycho character

Without the sex, we're left with a story that's all kinds of stupid and worse, dull.

The problem is not that it's just terrible, but that it's also no fun. At all.