This screen adaptation of Flowers in the Attic, Virginia Andrews' classic teen novel of adolescent torment and forbidden love, shies away from what made the book so hugely popular, namely the incestuous sex between the two older children, Cathy (Kristy Swanson) and Chris (Jeb Stuart Adams). When the father of four beautiful blond children is suddenly killed, their mother (Victoria Tennant) takes them to the family home she fled 17 years earlier. Their fierce and frightening grandmother (Louise Fletcher) locks them in an upstairs room, from which the only escape is into the cluttered and cobwebbed attic. The children's isolation gets more and more extreme as their mother abandons them, finally even slowly poisoning them to gain her father's inheritance. The movie insinuates but does not make explicit incestuous longing in all directions: Cathy's father brings her special presents before he dies, Chris scrubs Cathy's back in the tub, Chris has a noticeably stronger attachment to their mother than Cathy does--not to mention that the grandmother whips the half-naked mother in front of the grandfather. Fletcher brings a bit of bite to her role, and the movie occasionally rises to absurdly lurid zest. --Bret Fetzer, Amazon.com
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Buy this DVD on Amazon.co.uk