"The Bad Twin" (neither IMDb.com nor Lifetime's own publicity had the definite article in the title, but it's there in the opening title credit) stars Haylie Duff as Dr. Kim Burgess, a psychiatrist who hosts a local radio show in which she gives advice to various callers with "issues." One day during her broadcast she gets a call from a woman who claims she's just a fake and doesn't know anything at all about how people really tick, and screams about how Dr. Burgess can represent herself as an expert on "families" when her own is wildly dysfunctional. Kim gives her call screener a nod and the screener hangs up on the woman in mid-call, but the woman later confronts her outside the studio where she's signing a few copies of her books for fans and turns out to be her sister Cassandra "Cassie" Murphy (Jacy King). Cassie is the mother of 15-year-old twin daughters Olivia and Quinn, both played quite effectively by Grace Van Dien, who turns in an accomplished performance in which she's able to communicate by slight differences in intonation and posture which girl is which. (The effects work that allows both Van Diens to appear on the screen together is also quite good, though there are a number of shots in which one twin has her back to the camera and it's obviously a stand-in or a double.) Cassie has just been put in a mental hospital for her attack on Kim, and rather than let her nieces go into foster care Kim agrees to take them in even though she doesn't know the first thing about parenting. Kim has a boyfriend, Kevin (Scott Bailey), who's cute and so young-looking he seems more like her son than her partner, but he's a pretty milquetoast character. At first the twins carry on a war of intimidation against their aunt, including stealing valuables from her home and burying them in her backyard, but then in a video call with their mom in the institution mom gives them written instructions so the hospital staff can't see what she's communicating with her daughters. She instructs them to find Kim's will — which, when they do, it turns out leaves her entire fortune to a charity instead of the sisters or their mom — and then, when they get a face-to-face visit, she plays Scrabble with them and spells out the words "ADOPTION" and "BE NEEDY." This gives the girls the message that they're supposed to go all out to get Kim to adopt them legally — and Olivia, who's clearly the "alpha" of the two, seeks out not only to get Kim to adopt them but to knock off anyone who might stand in the way of that plan.
"The Bad Twin" is a good movie but it didn't seem as interesting as it would have if it hadn't been preceded on Lifetime's schedule by the superior "Secrets of My Stepdaughter," and I think the main problem with it is there's no real suspense. Unlike in "Secrets of My Stepdaughter" — or the obvious model for this sort of story, "The Bad Seed," which writer Alix Reeves was so blatantly ripping off she might have well have called it "The Bad Seeds" — we know from the beginning the twins, Olivia in particular, are up to no good. And as well as Grace Van Dien acquits herself as the twins, it's all too obvious she's modeling her performance on Patty McCormick's in "The Bad Seed" — which pretty much has set the template for how to play a child psycho. "The Bad Twin" is decently done and offers a few of the frissons director John Murkowski and writer Reeves were clearly after, but it's not that good and it doesn't offer the sinister progression of its models in which we first took the psycho girl(s) at face value and only later realized they were psycho.
"The Bad Twin" is a good movie but it didn't seem as interesting as it would have if it hadn't been preceded on Lifetime's schedule by the superior "Secrets of My Stepdaughter," and I think the main problem with it is there's no real suspense. Unlike in "Secrets of My Stepdaughter" — or the obvious model for this sort of story, "The Bad Seed," which writer Alix Reeves was so blatantly ripping off she might have well have called it "The Bad Seeds" — we know from the beginning the twins, Olivia in particular, are up to no good. And as well as Grace Van Dien acquits herself as the twins, it's all too obvious she's modeling her performance on Patty McCormick's in "The Bad Seed" — which pretty much has set the template for how to play a child psycho. "The Bad Twin" is decently done and offers a few of the frissons director John Murkowski and writer Reeves were clearly after, but it's not that good and it doesn't offer the sinister progression of its models in which we first took the psycho girl(s) at face value and only later realized they were psycho.