Petals on the Wind (2014)

Movie Info

Ah…the romance of incest

Ten years have passed since the Dollangangers escaped Foxworth Manor and managed to find a somewhat happy life living with a doctor named Paul Sheffield.  Now, Sheffield is dead, and the Dollangangers are making their own lives.  Cathy (Rose McIver) is a skilled ballerina who has found love in a man named Julian Marquet (Will Kemp).  Carrie (Bailey De Young) finds her growth stunted from her childhood and mocked by girls at school.  Christopher (Wyatt Nash) is an aspiring surgeon and dating a surgeon’s daughter named Sarah Reeves (Whitney Hoy).  Unfortunately, the past cannot be buried and Corrine (Heather Graham) and her mother Olivia (Ellen Burstyn) are alive…and still haunting their memories.

Directed by Karen Moncrieff, Petals on the Wind is made-for-TV adaptation of V.C. Andrews’ 1980 novel.  The film aired on May 26, 2014 on Lifetime and is a follow-up to the 2014 film Flowers in the Attic.  The movie was met with lower ratings than the original film.

Sorry, I picture this kid freakishly small

Flowers in the Attic was always a trashy story (and later a trashy film).  Despite this, it was good trash.  The smutty dirty story about incest, affairs, and sex had a strange gothic horror to it.  While the first story was a rather coherent story with a beginning and end, this entry is a little less streamlined and obvious set-up for sequels.

The movie skips a significant part of the story.  The whole ten year period after the first film would have been difficult to do with the aging characters, but it feels like you’ve missed something here.  The film shows the ramifications of the first film and eventually streamlines into Cathy’s revenge on her mother, but it takes a while to get there.

The revenge is rather twisted and the story is hyper sexualized.  All the characters just use sex as their power and despite the warnings of incest by Olivia, the characters end up in an incestuous relationship.  It is a rather strange message and odd that a story like this became so popular among readers.

I don’t know how many parties I go to where a woman shows up and accuses the host and her mother of murder…

The movie also loses a lot of its rather strong cast.  I though Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka was a great as Cathy, and Rose McIver just isn’t as strong.  Wyatt Nash is also average, and I don’t think Bailey De Young is odd enough looking to play Carrie. Heather Graham and Ellen Burstyn don’t have enough meat to their roles.

With more locations and visuals than in the original story, the film has the problem of looking like a TV movie.  With the weaker visuals and weaker stories, this is trashier than the first entry and not as enjoyable.  Despite this, Petals on the Wind did garner enough viewers to greenlight two sequels If There Be Thorns and Seeds of Yesterday.

Related Links:

Flowers in the Attic (2014)

If There Be Thorns (2015)

Seeds of Yesterday (2015)

Flowers in the Attic (1987)

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