Wampyrii doesn't live here any more. Play nice y'all. :)
Wampyrii doesn't live here any more. Play nice y'all. :)
Member since:15.09.2000
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Admittedly there are few here who will not have already seen this movie or seen it in the television listings and passed it by - its certainly had that many showing thats you'd be hard pressed to have avoided it completely anyway. As such, its not something I would generally bother to review, but considering the fact that up until yesterday, what is generally considered to be one of the best'enemy within' style thrillers out there didn't even have a category here...well anyway, here my two penneth...
The Hand That Rocks The Cradle is a movie which plays upon a parent's worst nightmares, ripping into the very heart of white middle class yuppie lifestyles but which tends to gloss over some of the more searching emotional issues in favour of going for the easy scare. We are presented with a parent's worst nightmare if only because the parents here are portrayed as being dumber than a sackful of arseholes, letting a stranger who appears unwarranted onto their doorstep into their lives and putting her in the most hallowed position of trust imaginable - as nanny to their children. There is no attempt to investigate the more heartrending decisions or guilt felt by parents who must(or choose to) work at the expense of looking after their children and the time it takes them to cotton on to their nanny's activities ranks them as among the dumbest parents around - but there you go, its Hollywood and there would be very litte
story here if people behaved completely rationally.
As it happens, in failing to address some of the more 'real life' issues which this movie lends itself too, what this movie has instead more room for is tension building and tension is something it crafts very well. Our family here, comprised of Annabella Sciorra and Matt McCoy as two middle class parents-to-be, begin the story having just lost their gynacologist after he moved to another town. Sciorra is pregnant and needs another which she finds in a doctor who sexually molests her on her first visit. Naturally she files a law suit against him, four other women following suit leading to him commiting suicide when he finds out. A number of months down the line, baby now born, a nanny appears on their doorstep offering her services to look after their son - and without hunting out references or asking too many questions they move her into the house and give her the job of looking after him - she seems a nice enough lady. Turns out however, that she lied about her name and is actually the wife of the doctor who commited suicide and blames Sciorra for the death of her husband and the subsequent miscarriage of her own child. Her aim is to tear apart this family from within in the same way that hers was torn apart a few months before...and she'll stop at nothing to see this happen...
Its an interesting premise but not exactly an original one - I've seen it before in The Stepfather for instance and I'm sure there were a number of others before this one as well - there have certainly been more than a few since...John Travolta's 'Domestic Disturbance'(rubbish though it was) springs to mind straight away as being one of the more recent re-treads. The reason this movie excels above the rest in my eyes however is that, despite its numerous logical flaws, it does manage to keep you on the edge of your seat the whole time. The star of the show is most definitely Rebecca de Mornay, and her performance is uniformly good with the most three dimensional of all the characters. Her switches from angel to demon in the blink of an eye are, not frightnening(criticisms of this movie are that people were told it was scary - and its the wrong choice of wording), but certainly unnerving and more than a little unsettling. She isn't exactly an actress you could ever accuse of setting the world alight, probably her most noteworthy movie would be this one, or Backdraft, but she is certainly more than equal to this role.
The other two main characters are somewhat more one dimensional, especially fuzzy-faced hubbie Matt McCoy who is the biggest drip you could ever imagine and with all he acting talent of a plank of 2 x 4. Fortunately all he is here for is to be wimpy and seduced by De Mornay and he isn't around too much other than in the background. A far more talented performer than the both of them is Anabella Sciorra, but I felt she was made to underplay her talents so as not to outshine De Mornay who is meant to be the focus of our attentions and hatred. Someone on the sidelines as a subplot is the retarded gardener and handyman in the family's employ played by Ernie Hudson who also falls foul to De Mornay's wicked plotting. Again a part well played and thankfully the message here is an uplifting one for the handicapped community rather than an exploitative one - so often the inclusion of a a character such as this smacks of exploitation or manipulation, but here the role played by Hudson is a key one.
It would be wrong to say that this is a 5 star movie because it almost certainly isn't - its not clever enough for that. Areas of the plot are glossed over and we are asked to believe that parents really are this careless with their children in order for the movie to work. As an attack on yuppie culture, or upon changing family values where work seemingly comes above childcare then its also somewhat lightweight again by failing to address many of the underlying issues or lend a sympathetic ear to the pressure of modern life upon the parental side. These are two areas where I felt a little more attention may have made have made for a better movie, but then perhaps that would have been asking too much. The Hand That Rocks The Cradle is instead rather like a pulp novel - it'll keep your eyes alight and you fingers busy turning over the pages in your mind and you'll certainly find yourself creaping ever closer to the very edge of your seat, but ultimately it acheives this through being rather lightweight and dumbing down to encompass a larger audience, keeping up the pace by skimping over the wider issues. As pure entertainment though, its a damn good movie, much better than previous reviews here would have you believe and certainly one I would recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it before.
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![The Hand That Rocks The Cradle [DVD] [1992]](http://picnicb.ciao.com/uk/78241501.jpg "The Hand That Rocks The Cradle [DVD] [1992]")
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