flowers in the attic

Director: jeffrey bloom

Actor: louise fletcher,victoria tennant,kristy swanson,jeb stuart adams

Data Published: Fri Nov 20 1987

Genres: Drama,Mystery,Thriller

Key Words: incest,uncle niece incest,girl,partial female nudity,bathtub

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093036/

WIKI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_in_the_Attic_(film)

Description: Flowers in the Attic is a movie starring Louise Fletcher, Victoria Tennant, and Kristy Swanson. Children are hidden away in the attic by their conspiring mother and grandmother.

Plot: After the sudden death of their father, four children — teenagers Chris and Cathy and 5-year-old twins Cory and Carrie — find themselves penniless and forced to travel with their mother Corrine to live with her wealthy parents (whom the children had neither met nor been told about before). Corrine informs her children that there has been tension between herself and her parents for many years, but does not elaborate and simply says they had cut her out of their lives for something she had done of which they disapproved. The children trust her, though Cathy is skeptical as she wonders what happened that caused the rift between her mother and her parents. Corrine's mother, Olivia, a religious fanatic, takes her daughter and her children into her home, though with the harsh condition that the children must be sequestered away in a locked room so that her husband Malcolm (who is dying) will never know of their existence. To that end, the children are shut inside one bedroom of the mansion, only with access to the mansion's attic via a secret stairway. It is on their first day there that their grandmother reveals the shocking truth of what caused Corrine to be disowned and stricken from her father's will years ago: Corrine's husband was really her uncle, her father's half-brother, making their love incestuous and their children the product of incest. When Corrine finally returns to the children that night, she is forced to show the children that she had been savagely bullwhipped by her mother as punishment for her marrying her uncle and having children from the union. Corrine confesses to the children that she and their father were niece and uncle, and her parents were livid as they believed Corrine disgraced the family; the children do not say anything but seem to accept it. Corrine tells the children that her parents made it clear that if she had any children by her uncle she would be disinherited, but because her father doesn't know about them she still has a chance to get the money when he passes away. She says that their confinement will only be for a short time: her father is deathly ill, and once she is able to convince him to secure her inheritance, they will be free and they will leave. The plot focuses on the children's ordeal as shut-ins and their clashes with the ultra-religious grandmother, who loathes the children due to their incestuous conception. The children struggle to survive, even as their mother's visits quickly taper off. In particular, Olivia becomes obsessed with Chris and Cathy, out of the warped belief that they have become lovers and are repeating the same incestuous acts like Corrine and her uncle did. Discovering them sleeping in the same bed one morning, the grandmother smashes Cathy's ballerina music box, given to her by her deceased father. After Olivia later discovers the two innocently talking while Cathy is bathing, she calls them sinners. Chris manages to chase her out, but Olivia later ambushes Cathy in the bedroom, locks Chris in the closet preceding the attic, and hacks off Cathy's hair with a pair of scissors. She then starves them for a week, and Chris is forced to feed Cory his own blood so he doesn't die of starvation. As time goes on, the children are often sick, especially Cory and Carrie. Chris and Cathy manage to secretly remove the hinges from their locked door on a few occasions to sneak out of their room, and discover that their mother has been living a life of luxury as well as dating a young lawyer, Bart Winslow. She does eventually come to visit them again, and they confront her about not visiting them anymore and leaving them to suffer at the hands of their grandmother. Corrine is very defensive and acts insulted, cries that they are cruel to think that she is deliberately neglecting them or enjoying life while they are locked up, then storms out. Shortly after, Cory becomes deathly ill. The children ask Olivia and Corrine to take Cory to the hospital, which they do, but later Corrine returns to inform them Cory has died. The children are devastated, but not long after they discover their pet mouse is found dead after eating part of a cookie Cory didn't finish, arousing suspicion in Chris and he investigates the cookie. Chris researches and discovers that Cory and their mouse were killed via arsenic poisoning, mixed in the sugar on the cookies they are served with breakfast, and they believe it's their grandmother who's been poisoning them. The remaining siblings decide to leave the attic once and for all. Chris sneaks out to steal money before they escape and discovers that their mother is planning to marry Bart Winslow at the mansion the next morning. Though upset, he suggests to Cathy they dress in fancy clothes from the attic, and use the wedding as a cover to sneak out of the house. When Olivia secretly enters their bedroom the next day, hoping to catch them once more doing something "evil", Chris takes her by surprise and beats her unconscious with a bedpost. As they are leaving, Cathy, not wanting her mother to get away with what she did to them and leaving them to suffer by their grandmother's hands, tells Chris they need to find their grandfather and tell him the truth so Corrine would lose her inheritance; they had come across him sleeping in his room once before while out and investigating their mother's absence. However, when they enter his room, they find it empty, with the bed dismantled: their grandfather has been dead for months. They also find a copy of his will that was two months old, which reveals a clause that states that if it is ever revealed Corrine had children from her first marriage, even after his death, she will be disinherited and lose all of her money. They realize that Corrine was the one poisoning the cookies, not their grandmother, and their mother was trying to kill them all so no one would know of their existence and secure her inheritance. The children crash the wedding ceremony and expose their mother to the guests and the groom; Corrine refuses to acknowledge the children as her own, and Cathy and Chris scold their mother for saying that she would come get them after her father died but breaking the promise when he did pass away, and Chris reveals they found the recent will and told her she knew no one could find out about them or she would lose everything, even after her father's death. Corrine denies it, then Chris shows everyone the dead mouse, proving that she tried killing them all, succeeding with Cory, when the new will was made. Cathy demands to know why her mother did those horrible things to them and offers her mother an arsenic-coated cookie as a wedding present, and in fury tries to force her mother to eat it, chasing her out to a balcony. After a brief struggle, Corrine accidentally falls and dies. Afterward, the children leave the mansion as their grandmother looks on with scorn; the narrator (an older Cathy's voiceover) explains that the children did manage to survive all by themselves, Chris went to medical school and became a doctor, Cathy got a job and started dancing again, although Carrie was "never truly healthy". She wonders aloud if her grandmother is still alive, anticipating Cathy's eventual return to claim the family's fortune.