The always challenging transition from adorable child performer to sexy adult star was achieved flamboyantly by actress Drew Barrymore with this erotic drama that unfolds like a paranoia-drenched Lolita (1962). Sylvie Cooper (Sara Gilbert) is a misanthropic student at a private high school for children of the privileged. While calling in a phony bomb threat to the TV station where her father, Darryl (Tom Skerritt) is a producer, Sylvia attracts the attention of Ivy (Drew Barrymore). Ivy is an
orphan from a poor family, attending the school on a scholarship. She and Sylvia quickly become best friends, and Ivy eventually moves out of her aunt's home and into the Cooper household. Ivy covets the Coopers' lavish lifestyle and luxuries, so she begins plotting to kill Sylvie's ailing mother Georgie (Cheryl Ladd), then seduce the alcoholic Darryl and frame Sylvie for the crime, thus taking over the Cooper house. Director Katt Shea Ruben and her co-writer husband Andy Ruben were veterans of the Roger Corman school of filmmaking. The success of Poison Ivy (1992) on video and cable television inspired a pair of sequels, Poison Ivy 2: Lily (1996) and Poison Ivy: The New Seduction (1997). ~ Karl Williams, Rovi
There is scarcely a moment in the movie when the story works as fiction; I was always aware of the casting, of the mood-setting devices, of the stylistic borrowings from Hitchcock.
Shea's arty-trashy exploitation film is an amalgam of Fatal Attraction, Stepfather, and Pasolini's Teorema, in all of which the order of a middle-class is disrupted by a depraved interloper, if only the script were better
If Drew Barrymore hadn't been so good at being bad, then this truly would have been bad. But luckily, she was good--and so it's decent. You got all that?
This is like a modern version of Lolita. Barrymore does a fantastic job of being the erotic femme fatale. I really loved this movie, it's thrilling and romantic at the same time. I highly recommend it.
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