The Bad Seed (1956)
Directed by Mervyn LeRoy
Air Force Colonel Kenneth Penmark and his wife, Christine, adore their daughter Rhoda, despite her secret tendency for selfishness. Christine keeps her knowledge of her daughter's darker side to herself, but when a schoolmate of Rhoda's dies mysteriously, her self-deception unravels.
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What critics compared The Bad Seed to
Other movies have told stories based around young men who lash out at society, but Ramsay blends the reality of that sort of situation with the type of bad kid horror subgenre seen in films such as "The Bad Seed," "The Omen" or "Orphan," only basing it in reality rather than doing it as a sensationalist genre film.
It's found in such brilliant short fictions as Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (filmed as The Innocents), Paul Bowles's Pages From Cold Point and, more recently, Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child, as well as horror movies such as The Bad Seed and The Omen and in real life in the James Bulger case.
Kevin is a horror movie trope -- ripped from movies like The Bad Seed, Village of the Damned, The Omen, and the recent Orphan -- far too menacing to be even remotely connected with anything real.
Motiveless malignancy in cinema youngsters is no rarity though, except for blood-will-out The Bad Seed, ordinarily from demonic possession.
From "The Bad Seed" to "The Omen" to "The Good Son," kids have been creeping us out for years.
As a result, "We Need to Talk About Kevin" comes across less like the powerful and profound drama that it clearly wants to be and more like an excruciatingly arty version of the old horror-exploitation standby of the killer kid, a trope that has been deployed in the past in works ranging from the Broadway-sanctified "The Bad Seed" to grindhouse insanity like "The Children" to mass-market takes like the Vera Farmiga vehicles "Joshua" and "Orphan."
You know that the nightmare of a ghoulish forced abortion that opens the movie is a premonition of bad experiences with evil kids, but you're thinking The Omen or The Bad Seed – something in the devil cult or genetic malfunction line.
Has John and Kate Coleman (Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga) ever watched The Bad Seed, for heaven’s sakes?
When watching the new Orphan, it's hard not to think of earlier "evil children" movies like Alice Sweet Alice (1976), The Bad Seed (1956), The Omen (1976 and 2006), and Village of the Damned (1960 and 1995).
Before you can say “The Bad Seed just got badder,” she’s attacking her snotty classroom rival on the playground, casually crushing injured pigeons with bricks, and threatening to castrate her stepbrother with a carpet knife.
The kind of thriller which echoes the likes of The Bad Seed (1956) and The Good Son (1993).
Wan no oculta que estamos frente a una cruza entre La Mala Semilla ( The Bad Seed , 1956), de Mervyn LeRoy, Las Esposas de Stepford ( The Stepford Wives , 1975), de Bryan Forbes, Chucky: El Muñeco Diabólico ( Child’s Play , 1988), de Tom Holland, Hardware (1990), de Richard Stanley, y La Huérfana ( Orphan , 2009), de Jaume Collet-Serra, e incluso coquetea con el slasher una vez que nuestra muñeca tuneada avant-garde desata su furia contra todos aquellos que amenazan física o psicológicamente a Cady, como el perro de la vecina Celia (Lori Dungey), un animal que se abalanza contra el androide y la niña cuando ambos osan entrar en la morada contigua, o un purrete psicópata llamado Brandon (Jack Cassidy), quien “viola” simbólicamente a M3GAN -esto es el mainstream yanqui, casi todo está vedado para lograr una baja calificación por edad para el estreno masivo en salas- cuando se lleva a la muñeca, la tira al suelo, le saca un zapato, la golpea en la cara e incluso le agarra el pelo, ganándose q…
Even with its echoes of "The Bad Seed" and "Misery," "Goodnight Mommy" unexpectedly hits a squirm-inducing nerve.
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After finally speaking up, Nancy (and here Winslet resembles not only Dennis, but Eileen Heckart's Hortense Daigle in "The Bad Seed," another stagey, campy film) doesn't feel so well and promptly vomits all over Penelope's displayed art books.
Actor Wentworth Miller's ('Prison Break') first produced script pays homage to Hitchcock's Uncle Charlie ("Shadow of a Doubt") with little dabs of "Psycho" (a motel, stuffed birds, reflections in a policeman's Ray Bans, a swinging cellar light, an unharmed fly) and a dollop of "The Bad Seed" for good measure, but the film impresses more as artful craftsmanship than emotionally satisfying thriller.
Park’s skills for surreal subjectivity and the mischievously weird certainly don’t hurt, but they can’t quite banish Stoker’s narrative speed bumps and draughts of cold air as the film bluntly denotes the compulsive correspondence of orgasm and murder, and nastiness by inheritance (evoking The Bad Seed).
Evil Dead: El Despertar ( Evil Dead Rise , 2023), nuevo capítulo de la retahíla del espanto que se propone independiente pero retoma a nivel conceptual lo hecho por Álvarez en Posesión Infernal , es el segundo largometraje del cineasta irlandés Lee Cronin, aquel de la interesante y remotamente similar El Bosque Maldito ( The Hole in the Ground , 2019), esa cruza entre La Invasión de los Usurpadores de Cuerpos ( Invasion of the Body Snatchers , 1956), de Don Siegel, La Mala Semilla ( The Bad Seed , 1956), de Mervyn LeRoy, El Otro ( The Other , 1972), de Robert Mulligan, El Resplandor ( The Shining , 1980), de Stanley Kubrick, y The Babadook (2014), gran obra de Jennifer Kent acerca de la histeria familiar.