"The Bad Seed" Disappoints!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                    Thank God, darlings, for my "Sound Of Music" post!  Had that not been there, many would think this Evil Child Month--first Amma Crellin on "Sharp Objects," then those awful real life bitches Lindsey Moss and Dallas Baron, and now Emma Grossman.

                                       Who the hell is Emma Grossman?  Well, she was always better known by another, and better name, Rhoda Penmark.  Yes, darlings, it is yet another remake of "The Bad Seed," and this, I have to say is the worst.  When will they stop trying to outdo this story?  The 1956 film, campy and dated as it is, is still the gold standard.  With its cast, and hysterics, it still reaches a level of suspense that this version does not begin to approach.

                                           The bare bones of the story is maintained--the framework, that is.  Some characters have been eliminated, and new ones created, under a different gender, which really does not work.  The story is so condensed, it provides no narrative context.

                                              That said, I have to say McKenna Grace as Emma/Rhoda is the best thing in the show.  They cast her strong, unlike in the 1985 version.  The trouble is, everyone around her, with the possible exception of Sarah Dugdale, who plays Nanny Chloe, the stand in for Leroy, is up to her level.  She and Grace get some sparks going, but how much more satisfying, campy and ironically fun it would have to have had Rebecca DeMornay play this role, much in the understated way she played Peyton Flanders in "The Hand That Rocks The Cradle."  That is the kind of wit, coupled with suspense, that this show needs.

                                                 Rob Lowe is so ineffectual and clueless as the father, I almost wish the child had done him in.  Well, she does get a chance to try, but he is then  shot, in a contrived last moment, at
the cabin (the climax takes place at a vacation spot) caretaker, where father David is shot to death, and Emma/Rhoda, sneeringly, goes off to live with his sister, Aunt Angela, whose family has no idea what they are soon in for.

                                                    So, yes, the ending is not censored.  But it almost doesn't matter because Lowe is so passive, works up no emotional concern or frenzy, and doesn't engender the kind of sympathy Nancy Kelly did, even with her histrionics.  A little more of those was needed from Lowe, instead of endless shots of him emerging from the shower, showing how good he can look in his Fifties.  Who the hell cares?  You never did anything for me, anyway, Rob!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                                     Forget the whole Claude Daigle-Eileen Heckart trope.  The child's name is Milo Curtis, and, until he beats her out for a Citizenship Medal (??????), they seem to be cordial friends.  But when the camera pans Milo overlooking a cliff, plunging down into the water, it becomes obvious what is going to happen, at the hands of Emma. And it does.  His mother, here called Maggie Curtis, is played by an actress named Shauna Johannesen, who has one screaming scene, but is not the fleshed out, devastated mother Eileen Heckart was, whose performance tore at the heart. Her, hers is just a throwaway role.

                                                       Save for the almost gratuitous scene, where original "Bad Seed" herself, Patty McCormack, now 73, is seen as a child psychiatrist, evaluating Emma, where she delivers the pithy line, "She reminds me of myself, when I was her age." there is really no need to see this abortive remake.  In fact if one is not a "Bad Seed aficionado, one will not get the irony of that scene, or the one where Emma lovingly runs both sides of her hands, across her father's cheeks.

                                                         So much for your great idea, Rob!  As for screenwriter, Barbara Marshall, what the hell did you think you were doing?   This should be a template for not to remake something having been done so perfectly in the first place.

                                                            And no piano playing?  No "Au Clair De La Lune?"

                                                            How dare they?????????????????