Daddy's Girl (1996)

brilliant actors, brilliant editing

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

No this isn't a clone or spin off from The Bad Seed. While Rhoda from the Bad Seed was born evil, Jody became evil because she was traumatized for something that her mother did to her father when she was only 6 years old. With her biological mother taking her biological father away from her she developed some kind of hatred towards mother figures and an obsession with the father figure. But when she is adopted for the second time (by the Mitchells) her urge to kill expands to anyone trying to keep her away from her daddy (Don). The way how she does it is pretty clever biding her time and making sure she isn't caught. She also knows pretty well how to lie and that no one is suspecting her. The only ones not really falling for her innocence are classmate Claire Landers and her cousin Karen Conners. Karen is the one going on investigation and finding out the truth about Jodie. I really liked the movie even though the ending was quite abrupt.

A yuppie couple adopts an eleven-year-old redheaded psycho named Jody (Gabrielle Boni). Thanks to childhood trauma, she kills people who threaten to come between her and her beloved new father (William Katt). Jody makes coffins for her dolls, scares another little girl by talking about worms eating dead bodies, tries to poison her grandmother by putting drain cleaner in her prune juice (!) and makes stupid wisecracks as she beats a social worker to death with a mallet, crushes her mean school principal with a bookcase, kills a lawyer with a fire poker and shoves mom (Michele Greene) off a balcony. The only person who knows something is wrong is the nosy niece (Roxana Zal), who starts researching Jody's past. Naturally no one believes her until it's too late.Too much time is spent, in typical made-for-TV-movie fashion, on the marital woes of the parents, and this is probably nothing you haven't seen before, but it's good, dumb fun all the same thanks mostly to the engagingly evil performance by young Gabrielle Boni. She's a good crier but her 'angry' expressions and dialogue delivery are hilarious. Oh well, that's just part of the fun!

So there I was. I'd been trying to get to sleep for nearly two hours, and so I turned on the tv. Grace Under Fire was just ending, and as my clock turned 3, _Daddy's Girl_ came on. I hit sleep/20 minutes on my remote and took off my glasses, expecting to pass out soon. Well, now it's well after 5am, and I'm stillup writing this, so you tell me what that means. Anyhow, _Daddy's Girl_ tells the touching story of young Jody, a girl who has been tossed around foster families for her entire life. Her current family loves her, but she really loves her father. She perceives everyone as a threat to take her away from her father, and, as any girl in the same situation would do, kills them all. Yep, school principal, grandmother, mother, adoption counselor -- she even attempts to kill her meddling cousin. This movie has some of the cheesiest and stilted dialogue I've ever had the pleasure to see. Through all the porno commercials and ads for the psychic friends ("Your husband is cheating on you." "Thanks so much! I'm so glad I called!"... I don't know about you, but if I called the psychic friends and they told me that, I'd be pretty upset and maybe go on a rampage like little Jody!), _Daddy's Girl_ kept me from turning the tv off, and so now I've been up all night, and I'll likely be up for another 20 some hours before I finally go to sleep. Kudos to the cast and crew of this film for making some of the finest garbage I've ever had the pleasure to view on network tv at 3am!

May be a good movie for little girls to watch and fantasize about how bad they could be. For adults it is a boring, predictable, flatly written movie.