First on this tape, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, one of a number of movies in the early 90s featuring psycho women. Not that it was a new theme – just look back to Play Misty For Me for example – but these felt like Fatal Attraction had started a trend in a Hollywood that didn’t appear to have much imagination.
The director of this film, Curtis Hanson, also made the excellent The River Wild, and the critically acclaimed LA Confidential.
Annabella Sciorra plays an expectant mother.
John de Lancie plays a creepy gynaecologist who gives Sciorra an inappropriate examination in a very uncomfortable scene. Nobody plays subtle menace like de Lancie.
She makes a complaint, after which several other women come forward with similar complaints, and he kills himself, leaving his pregnant wife Rebecca de Mornay alone, and because of the lawsuits against his estate, and an insurance company clause against suicide, she’s left with nothing. Less than nothing, because the trauma of this news brings on a miscarriage, and an emergency hysterectomy.
Sciorra and husband Matt McCoy hire Ernie Hudson as a handyman. He has learning difficulties, but is liked by the family so they keep finding jobs around the home for him.
Sciorra has her baby, and she and her husband discuss whether they should get a nanny. Then, she bumps into De Mornay in the street, who introduces herself as ‘Peyton Flanders’ and says she’s applying for the nanny position. The stage is set for her to inveigle her way into the household.
This is a very creepy film. That’s not a criticism. But when De Mornay looks as if she might smother the baby, but the scene ends with her breastfeeding it, there’s a lot of psychological buttons being pressed.
Julianne Moore has just appeared as Sciorra’s best friend. She’s not going to fall for De Mornay’s schtick, so I fear for her safety. But the whole film perked up just by her being in it.
Hudson accidentally sees De Mornay secretly nursing the baby, so she confronts him to intimidate him. She’s really scary. “I won’t let you hurt them. They’re my friends” he says to himself. I fear for his safety.
Sure enough, De Mornay starts talking about inappropriate behaviour, dripping poison. Then she plants the daughter’s underwear in Hudson’s cart and tricks Sciorra into finding them. Hudson is out of the picture.
This is really well written, by Amanda Silver. But her filmography is nowhere near as full as I’d have expected. I wonder if that’s because most of the credit for the film went to the director. This is like a ticking clock, ratcheting up the tension as De Mornay keeps driving tiny wedges between Sciorra and her family in creepily subtle ways.
They even manage to do the “wife thinks he’s cheating but he’s really organising a surprise party” scene.
Julianne Moore comments on the windchime that De Mornay put outside the baby’s room. It becomes significant later on, when she’s given De Mornay’s old house to sell and sees the same windchime in a picture, and soon puts things together. Sadly, De Mornay is ready for such a confrontation, and she’s booby-trapped the greenhouse, and Moore is caught in a massive hail of glass.
Now she’s emptying out all of Sciorra’s asthma inhalers.
When Sciorra sees Moore’s mangled body she has an Asthma attack, almost dying. When she returns from hospital, De Mornay has got even closer to the family, even redecorating the nursery.
So she goes to Moore’s office to find out what she was doing just before she died, and follows the trail to De Mornay’s old house, where she finds an identically decorated nursery and the crucial clue, De Mornay’s breast pump. “She used to to keep her milk up” Sciorra realises, and a clue I din;t think a male writer would have come up with.
So now we’re in to the climax. Sciorra confronts De Mornay at home, and punches her so hard she’s thrown across the kitchen table. They take back her key and tell her to leave, then, there’s a piece of dialogue I want to kiss.
CLAIRE
Call the police.
MICHAEL
Claire, calm down.
CLAIRE
Michael, you don't know what she's capable of.
MICHAEL
Calm down, we have her keys.
CLAIRE
I think she rigged the greenhouse. I think she
rigged the greenhouse for me.
MICHAEL
All right, get the kids' things. We'll go to a
hotel.
Unfortunately, after that brief piece of sensible behaviour, there is a certain amount of horror movie behaviour right after. Hubbie McCoy hears the strains of Gilbert and Sullivan coming from the basement, where De Mornay was sleeping, so of course he goes down to investigate, rather than, I don’t know, locking the basement door and blocking it with furniture.
I’m carping, really, because, if you accept that this is how people behave in movies, this really is a cracking finale. It has absolutely everything. Both parents get variously incapacitated by De Mornay, leaving the big sister (who’s only about 6) to keep the baby away from De Mornay, who’s stalking the house with a poker. Frankly, she shows more invention and common sense than either of her parents. “You’re not my mommy” she shouts as she locks De Mornay into a bedroom.
The film even contrives to move the climax into the attic, where we find, surprise, Ernie Hudson’s Solomon has come to save the children by escaping down a ladder, having left a baby monitor to distract De Mornay downstairs.
But the law of drama dictates a few things from this climax, and this film is nothing if not law abiding. Sciorra recovers enough to confront De Mornay in the attic, but her Asthma kicks in, and De Mornay mocks her weakness. But wait! As soon as De Mornay turns her back and walks away, in victory, Sciorra’s breath stops rasping. She was faking it, and with a little look to her daughter to let her know she’s OK, she hurls herself at De Mornay.
But there’s still time for another action beat, as De Mornay, after Sciorra gets in a few good thumpings, gets the upper hand again, Hudson grabs her had to stop her bashing Sciorra with the poker, then he gets a few thumps for his trouble which he’s trying to protect the baby he’s carrying, until we finally get the ending we really want (and the laws of thrillers demand) as Sciorra pushes De Mornay out of the window, and she lands on the picket fence, the only correct ending for a villain in movies like this.
This is a silly film, but it’s a brilliantly written silly film. Rebecca De Mornay is outstanding, in fact the whole cast, Sciorra, Hudson and Moore particularly, are excellent. Husband McCoy is a bit bland for my tastes, but to be fair, he doesn’t get an awful lot to do, as all the heavy lifting in this movie is in the hands of the wonderful female cast.
I remember enjoying this a lot on its release, but I haven’t really revisited it since, so I’m glad to see it still works well.
After this, recording switches to another movie on Sky Movies, rather less well remembered by me. It’s The Lawnmower Man, based (very loosely, I think) on a short story by Stephen King and one of the standard bearers for the 90s wave of Virtual Reality films and TV shows.
Pierce Brosnan is researching into increasing the intelligence of chimps using drugs and Virtual Reality training, But he’s chafing at the military focus of the research, funded by a shadowy organisation called ‘The Shop’.
His star chimp gets out, tries to escape and kills a guard before being killed itself. This sequence betrays the low budget of the movie. Virtually every shot of the chimp is either a close-up of its face, or a POV shot from behind the chimp’s helmet, intercut with fairly rudimentary VR graphics.
We also meet Jeff Fahey as Jobe, a man with learning difficulties (that’s two for two on this tape) who, like Solomon in the previous movie, does general garden maintenance. He’s the Lawnmower Man. He’s also being regularly beaten by the priest who looks after him.
Brosnan takes a leave of absence from the research center, but is still obsessed with his work, to the extent that his wife (or girlfriend) leaves him because he spends all his time in his own VR rig. And who wouldn’t want to live in this dayglo blobby world. It’s hard to believe that this movie was released a year after Terminator 2, and only a year before Jurassic Park. Clearly, quality of CGI was also budget related.
Brosnan starts doing his experiments on Jobe, who starts learning at an accelerated rate, and who also starts brushing his hair and wearing better clothes.
Jobe has a young friend (not in a Dave Nice kind of way) played by Austin O’Brien from The Last Action Hero.
Jobe starts gaining telekinetic powers, which becomes dangerous when the slimy guy working for The Shop changes the programming without Brosnan’s knowledge. Dean Norris turns up as the head of The Shop.
Pretty soon, the film descends into a standard revenge story, as Jobe finds all the people who were abusive to him or his friends. The evil priest gets consumed by some primitive particle simulation.
He finds the bully at the petrol station and… well I’m not quite sure what he does but it has his face, and his mouth is lawnmower blades.
Austin O’Brien’s abusive father gets attacked by Jobe’s supercharged lawnmower, which at least is funny.
All the while, Jobe seems to be cosplaying as Automan.
Trying to get to the mainframe (of course there’s a mainframe) Jobe sets some poorly rendered CGI bees on the guards.
They really like this blobby effect – they’ve used it three times so far.
Jobe gets into the mainframe, but can’t get out. This is me trying to remember the password I used for a service I logged into once seven years ago.
There’s a nice dedication to the producer Milton Subotsky at the end.
This is a very average movie, far too impressed with its ‘cutting edge’ VR stuff to do much of anything interesting with the story. Oddly, I see echoes of this story in the much more recent Transcendence, where Johnny Depp puts himself into the mainframe, with similar megalomanical results. That had better effects, though.
After this, recording continues for a short time, and we’re promised ‘erotic adventures after dark’ by the announcer, at which point the recording stops.
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