74 - Daddy's Girl

    An adopted girl is obsessed with her relationship to her father, and is willing to kill anyone who threatens the stability of that relationship.
    This enjoys a healthy 4.5 on IMDB.  I’m a little surprised to see it that high.  The movie is possibly one of the silliest of the “evil child” genre.  Some of them can be very good, and much more interesting, probing into the difficulties of dealing with kids who want to do bad things.  I’ve enjoyed The Bad Seed, and I liked The Good Son.  There are a few other ones like Twisted or Don’t Go to Sleep, that reach into a level of campiness.
    But this is a weak script.  It’s hard for me to say that, since I think they actually did a good job structuring the story, even if it was predictable and fairly dumb.
    If this movie were released in the 80s, I’d think it was fantastic.  But it was released in 1996, and even as a straight-to-video release, it’s pretty silly.
    First, the dialogue is strained.  The girl is concerned that her school principal doesn’t like her.  Daddy suggest volunteering to do book reports during the summer to show the principal she’s serious about getting better.  I’ve never heard of this approach.  Why would the principal be interested in doing this?  Isn’t this something you’d do with a teacher?  It’s weird, and it’s a real stretch of imagination to accomplish something minimal - giving the girl an excuse to go to visit the principal.
    Second, the acting is weak.  I’m not a great judge of acting.  I’ve come to admire acting skills in pretty much everything I watch now.  A good actor can take passable dialogue, and turn it into a goldmine.  So much of the movie was centered on this girl, who overacts in every possible scene, and this may have given the impression that the rest of the cast wasn’t doing well either.  Who knows?  It could be an issue of the director making bad calls.
    There’s this fantastically terrible thing happening in the movie.  The little girl doing the killing gives punchlines to her kills!  They aren’t especially clever, but they are completely ridiculous.  She kills a guy with a meat tenderizer, and then tells him “you’re dead meat.”

    My favorite moment in the movie is a tiny little thing.  After the girl pushes the grandma down the stairs, she has to sneak out of the house without being noticed.  She manages to do this.  She gets on her bike, and rides away, looking suspicious.  She rings her bell.