Bad Seed
Killer child movies are generally the toughest nut to crack in the horror genre (although the formula might have been perfected in Pet Sematary) but the originator of the premise was this shocking (when it came out in 1956) portrayal of a sociopathic little girl (Patty McCormack, who overcame being a child star with little to no trouble and went on to have a respectable character acting career all the way on up to today) who not only commits cold blooded murder against another child, but also exhibits a callous lack of empathy over it as well, laughing and skipping along while everyone else recoils in horror. The problems arise from the story’s origins which since it comes from a stage play, director Mervyn LeRoy would stoically direct it as such, with dialogue scenes amongst adult actors that go on seemingly forever and the tendency to stay rooted in one setting as per the norm for stage productions, but when done here creates a glacial pace that is only relieved once McCormack’s evil little girl is onscreen. McCormack’s spot on portrayal of childhood apathy remains arguably the best of its kind in screen history (with a well deserved Best Supporting Actress Oscar Nomination), but the scenes between her and a possibly pedophile caretaker (Henry Jones) who sees her as the killer that she is while at the same time struggling to contain his own uncontrollable desires (at one point even stealing her shoes) results in the film’s best bits with undeniable psychological intensity leveled off by McCormack cheerfully laughing off his accusations / advances while at the same time keeping secrets with him in order to create an artificial aura of having bonded with the pervert so that eventually she can set him up for the kill later on. Then there is Nancy Kelly (Oscar Nomination for Best Actress) as McCormack’s mom who slowly realizes that her young daughter is a cold blooded monster, a harrowing performance at times (certainly also for any moms that might be watching) but at the same time clearly filled with some obvious attempts at Oscar bait (which appears to have succeeded). With a dead little boy turning out to be the second in McCormack’s body count, we then get the sad sight of Eileen Heckart as the grieving boy’s mom (gnashing her teeth towards her own Supporting Actress Oscar Nomination), incredibly effective in her first scene being all drunk and funny yet still broken, but when brought on for her second appearance in the movie (threatening to personally kill the little girl herself), she wears out her welcome, being more of a parody than anything else, but then this is a movie filled with scene after scene of people just sitting around talking while the murders are kept offscreen and become instead the subject of many of the conversations. The then trendy scientific and political themes of heredity vs environment (which also inspired Reagan’s Bedtime For Bonzo) are trotted out here as a nice patterned way to explain McCormack’s murderous impulses (her actual grandmother had been a notorious female serial killer) when no such explanation was really needed and would have made this little girl seem even scarier when no real, tangible reason could be attributed to her behavior. Eventually the pedophile is fried up until he’s crispin brown, the emotionally ravaged mother gives one of the saddest monologues in movie history and McCormack goes down to one of the most outrageous death scenes for any villain in movie history (hint: Act Of God) which contradicted the original play’s ending where the little girl outsmarts everyone so that she can kill again (especially with her well connected Marine Colonel father who dotes on his little Daddy’s Girl while enabling her every step of the way), but the overall stilted, stagy nature of the piece (including the viewer’s tendency to drift away during long dialogue scenes whenever McCormack is not around) and ridiculously overlong 2+ hour running time knocks this down to a level where it’s mostly seen today as being a novelty camp classic but little more…
5/10