No no no no no–a remake would be disastrous!
I’d forgotten about that goofball spanking coda at the end. That was just wretched.
I loved drunken slatten Hortense Daigle. Whatever else one might say about the film or the performances, I can’t argue with Eileen Heckart’s nom for Best Supporting Actress. She was awesome.
There is absolutely no way that a remake could ever, ever work.
Even with Dakota Fanning, Jennifer Tilly and Tom Cruise?
Okay, that even shocked me.
My sister rented *The Bad Seed *at Thanksgiving and we all just enjoyed the hell out of it, including my sixth-grade son, who’d never seen it before. Truly a great bad movie.
Afterwards, my son, who has terrible handwriting, said to me, “Well, Mom, at least you’ll never have to worry about me winning a penmanship medal!”
Did you notice she was married to Sam Drucker? No wonder he ran off to Hooterville to open a General Store!
Only if Tom Cruise plays little Claude Daigle . . .
I watched the last few minutes last night, and have now seen both endings. Neither of them is much to write home about, but at least the orginial one serves justice.
The novel Nursery Crimes by B M Gill is definitely derivative, but shows a far better childish monster than the movie.
I love The Bad Seed.
I’d add Mildred Pierce to the trifecta.
When people talk about the awful ending, I always wonder–do you mean the spanking business at the very end, or the other part?
If it’s the spanking, I’ll agree it’s stupid, but if it’s other, then I have to disagree. There aren’t enough movies
in which a smarmy little precious brat gets zapped by lightning.
I’m much happier seeing that than I would the book’s “twist” ending.
BTW, does anybody else think Nancy Kelly’s character is headed for a breakdown even before things start happening?
Isn’t this essentially a remake?
If so, it completely validates lissener’s opinion. Ugh. That movie stank.
It did, but it did have a couple of things going for it:
We get to see Macaulay Culkin cash in his chips.
Also, young Elijah Wood was a cutey.
Different strokes I guess (which is sort of a pun for those who read the spoiler box). That ending was crammed down the throats of the filmmakers by the production code and was just completely ludicrous.
The spanking was also stupid, and, according to Robert Osborne, was forced on the filmmakers by the studio just in case people forgot that the “disturbing” things they’d just seen weren’t real.
Oh, yes–one of the things I liked is that, basically, everyone in the movie is more than a little off-kilter. Can you imagine how thrilling it would have been to see in the theater, with Nancy Kelly, Patty McCormack, Henry Jones, Eileen Heckert, playing their original roles live? Jiminy, for a time machine. Isn’t she great when she has that complete breakdown when Leroy meets his reward? Banging her hand against the table (she must have been black and blue for the whole run of the show!). And giving Rhoda her “vitamins.” Just . . . creepy.
And the Broadway ending, where the other dies and little Rhoda lives, to go on killing.
Yes, both the tacked on Hays ending (God punishes evildoers) and the credits shenanigans (Don’t be disturbed, Audience; it’s all make believe!) were total copouts. It should have ended with the mother dying and the Bad Seed living.
A hysterically funny musical, based on Gypsy, All About Eve, and The Bad Seed is Ruthless! The Musical. Look a little further down on the link and you can hear snippets from some of the songs - this is the LA cast version.
The original little girl star (Tina) of the first NY staging of this show was none other than a very young Brittney Spears!
The TV remake from 1985 kept that ending.
Yes. It was based on the play, not the movie; kind of a re-filming of the play rather than a remake of the movie. Cheesy, but the whole package–even with both fake endings–are part of what redeems such a horribly bad movie and makes it endlessly watchable. As wrong as it is, I love the credits spanking, because it almost seems to be making a twisted commentary on the real dark side of the Ward-June-Beaver facade of the Fifties Family. Course, any such commentary is totally supplied by the modern viewer, but that doesn’t make it any less deliciously creepy.
I think the end credits of Bob Balaban’s masterful satire of Fifties mores, Parents, is a sly reference to The Bad Seed.
A song for everyone who loves The Bad Seed.