I'll never understand the big deal with sex-crazed, insecure Lolitas bringing havoc wherever they go to older, quiet men who have settled into a life of complacency and predictability. This time, however, the focus is not only the father figure but the daughter in a plot that has "lesbian overtones" written all over it like a crazy person's lipstick-smeared face. The Lolita of the piece is Ivy, played by Drew Barrymore like she was practising for the part in an audition to find the next Marilyn Monroe with a modern, late-Eighties feel. The fact that she's blonde in a year where being blonde meant being ultra-bad (just check in on the two menacing blonds in BASIC INSTINCT) makes her apparently more attractive to the Daria-like Sylvie, here played as drab as possible by Sara Gilbert of "Roseanne" fame. Anyway, Ivy walks into Sylvie's life, seduces her with that mane of blond hair and well-practised confidence, walks into her house, does a couple of nasty things, and winds up in a predicament. Nothing new, but the movie in itself has a cheap, C-movie feel, like something that should have gone straight to video with lesser known actors under its cast but that inexplicably made it into the theatres and did nothing to advance Drew Barrymore's career. It incidentally gave way to sequels: the kind that does make it to the DTV category.
Review of Poison Ivy
