I watched this on the movie channel last night to try and take my mind off what happened in NY. Anyway in the scene at the funeral where the kid gives the video tape to the father it looked to me like there were bits deleted. When the father was watching the tape it shows the mother ouring something from a bottle into the little girls soup. When I first saw the film I swear I could read the label on the bottle clearly at some point in the scene. Last night I couldnt. Anyone know what was in the bottle?
No idea, but, hey, I’ll hijack the thread to give one of my favorite mini-rants concerning this movie.
The girl who was poisoned was a bitch! I mean, you go to HJO for help, and he agrees to help you. He goes across town in a bus, to crash your funeral, and you scare the shit out of him by popping out from under the bed!?! I mean, damn, he’s here to help you, can’t you at least meet him at the door!? Talk about inconsiderate and rude. I mean, sure you’re dead, but you don’t see Bruce Willis becoming a prick, do you?
I remember thinking it looked like a Pine-Sol bottle. Dunno if that’s what it really was, though.
I agree with AudreyK. I remember it to look like a pine sol bottle with the label removed, so no product placement was involved but you could clearly tell what it was. Like how in some movies they have a can that looks like budweiser but when you look closely it just sas “beer” on it.
The bottle is shaped like the pine sol bottle, but the label simply says “pine” in large black (but lower case) letters. It looks like the label might also say something in red letters, above the word “pine” but it’s too hard to see.
OK so there is some agreement that it is PineSol. I had a feeling it was some househould cleaner but I’m not familiar with american products. This probably belongs in GQ now but what would the effects of long term ingestion of PineSol be? And would it really kill you?
On the back of a bottle of Pin-Sol, it warns you not to drink any. If you do, you will die, and haunt kids while constantly throwing up on them, for all of eternity. 
You know, since there’s no product placement involved, seems the producers might have picked a less smelly cleaner to kill the kid with. You can smell Pine Sol a mile away. You’d think the kid would be tipped off. Why not Drain-O, or something instantly recognizable as deadly, rat poison perhaps. Something that didn’t smell like Mom was going to clean you to death.
And good rant, BTW. 
I think the idea was that the mother was only putting a capful of the pine cleaner into a full bowl of soup. It’s indicated in the movie that she has the child so browbeat that she won’t complain to her father or anyone else outside the family. The line is something close to “And I don’t want to hear any complaints about it tasting funny, either!” I also think if she’d used something more potent, like rat poison, any attending doctor would have noticed right away. Plus, this woman was mentally ill, and needed to draw out the daughters sickness as long as possible, so that she, (the mother), could get lots of attention and sympathy for having such a sick child that the doctors couldn’t cure. I forget the name of this particular mental illness, maybe “Munchausan syndrome”?
By proxy. Means you’re seeking attention through the induced illness of someone in your care.
Munchausan syndrome means you’re doing it to yourself.
Good point. I just meant eeency weeency amounts of the poison, though; not enough to detect. My only point was how smelly the pine cleaner is.
The kid was tipped off, if not by the smell then by something else. It seemed clear to me that she knew what her mother was doing.
I thought it was not the mother who did that to the kid, but that it was her stepmother.
[Dr. Evil voice] Her evil stepmother? [/Dr. Evil voice]
Seriously, though, you’d have to know how something was going to affect someone before you slowly poisoned them. Rat poison, as was suggested, is usually an anti-coagulant. Internal bleeding might be too easy to diagnose and treat (vitamin K is an antidote). Also, since anti-coagulants weaken the blood vessels, an aneurism might result, which would really raise suspicions. I mean, a 10-year-old kid having a stroke? Even constant nosebleeds could very easily lead a doctor to figure out she was being deliberately poisoned.
I’m not sure what the effects of a cleanser would be. What caustic ingredients would be in it? Lye? What would the long-term affects of small amounts of lye be?
Also, since the mother was clearly not using a name brand, it was probably some watered-down bargain-basement store brand, so it might not have been as pungent as Pine-Sol.
The crowd watches in riveted silence. The father never takes his eyes off of the screen.
The image of the mother prepares the meal. She uncovers the fruit and the soup. Places a straw into the drink.
And then it happens.
The image of the mother walks to a closet. Opens it. An assortment of household cleaners and sponges are kept inside. She pulls out a bottle of floor cleaner. Reads the label for the ingredients. Walks back to the food tray, where she unscrews the cap on the floor cleaner. The mother pours some into the cap. Checks it.
From http://home.online.no/~bhundlan/scripts/TheSixthSense.htm
One other reason for using something as common as a floor cleaner is that it’s so innocuous that nobody’s going to really question or even pay attention to the fact that you buy it often. That’s not quite the case with most rat/mouse/bug poisons.
Secondly, it was my understanding that the mother wanted the girl to appear to have a long and lingering chronic illness. Therefore, she wouldn’t have wanted something that was obviously poisonous, or which had readily identifiable poisons.
I don’t have a bottle of Pine-Sol handy, nor would my bare year of chemistry qualify me to rank what would be toxic. I did look on my bottle of Spic-n-Span to find that it consisted of “cleaning agents (including ionic and nonionic compounds), perfume and water”. WTF??? I guess it’s the ‘cleaning agents’ you have to watch out for…
I make body soaps, which contain lye as an inital ingredient only. Any soap that you buy (even “lye soap”) doesn’t have any active lye left in it.
I don’t know what the long-term effects would be–probably death–but I can tell you from experience that even the smallest amount (and I mean dust particles that you can’t even SEE) of active lye burns like crazy. No way you could ingest it without painful burns, blisters, etc. So lye would be a quick, painful, nasty death. In smaller amounts, if ingested and untreated, I guess it would be a slower, painful, nasty death. But it wouldn’t take much, and the trauma to the body would be evident.
I have a friend who makes industrial cleaners (for floors, etc) and they all contain some percentage of caustics. Of course, maybe they are all neutralized by the acids in the mix, I don’t know.
Never having tasted Pine Sol, I don’t know if you would realize something was off or not. But I did one time accidently get a tiny amount of fragrance oil (“Never eat shrimp when making soap” is my new philosophy) in my mouth, and I tasted it for hours.
I think the whole Pine Sol thing was a device…but anything more obscure and people wouldn’t have gotten it.
jmho
~karol
This is one reason I love this place. Idle speculation turns into opportunities for instruction.
Dopers rock.
I make body soaps, which contain lye as an inital ingredient only. Any soap that you buy (even “lye soap”) doesn’t have any active lye left in it.
I don’t know what the long-term effects would be–probably death–but I can tell you from experience that even the smallest amount (and I mean dust particles that you can’t even SEE) of active lye burns like crazy. No way you could ingest it without painful burns, blisters, etc. So lye would be a quick, painful, nasty death. In smaller amounts, if ingested and untreated, I guess it would be a slower, painful, nasty death. But it wouldn’t take much, and the trauma to the body would be evident.
I have a friend who makes industrial cleaners (for floors, etc) and they all contain some percentage of caustics. Of course, maybe they are all neutralized by the acids in the mix, I don’t know.
Never having tasted Pine Sol, I don’t know if you would realize something was off or not. But I did one time accidently get a tiny amount of fragrance oil (“Never eat shrimp when making soap” is my new philosophy) in my mouth, and I tasted it for hours.
I think the whole Pine Sol thing was a device…but anything more obscure and people wouldn’t have gotten it.
jmho
~karol
Sorry 'bout that. Still learning.
Soap I know.
Message boards, I’m in the dark.
~karol