It is a rare occasion that I watch television during the daytime. Even when I was on maternity leave with my first, I rarely looked at the google box. I would be often asked in jest had I got into Jerry Springer yet, but the few times I glanced at it told me it would be utterly repulsive viewing. Who decided it would be hugely entertaining to showcase incestuous yokel families (with less than the standard number of adult teeth in a set between them), all with hyphenated first names (and the name to the right of the hyphen is always Jo, Joe, or Lee), and all arguing about why the other family members felt entitled to be also having sex with the conjoined twin midgets with whom he or she was currently in a sexual relationship. That last sentence might seem bamboozling, but it still contains more coherence and common sense than the typical episode of The Jerry Springer Show.
Back to my point: I finished work about lunch time on Friday, so I decided I would make a cup of tea and relax. The television was already on, and I gleaned it was the midday movie. There was a young woman in a wheelchair arguing with a home care nurse about the meals she was being served, and I thought: This rings a rather unappealing bell - and I have just realised I have inadvertently made a kind of pun. I picked up my iPad and did some quick googling, and sure as eggs, it was a dramatization of the novel Gates of Paradise by VC Andrews (or more truthfully, a ghost writer churning out Virginia Andrews-style pap following Andrews' demise, which the VC Andrews novel series are). This series featured the family of a girl named Heaven. Like most of the VC Andrews factory, it told of family secrets that seemed to centre around young women being porked by their half-brothers, step-brothers, step-fathers, or uncles. Come to think of it, these families would have been ripe for an episode of The Jerry Springer Show. Women of a certain age will likely remember reading this series around the late 1980s. The books were trashy car-crashes, and the writing was airy-fairy, farty piffle. Heaven was a character I detested with scary vehemence. Her ability to annoy the living snot out of anybody was debilitating enough to stop a charging rhino. On the scale of punchable women in literature, she is matched only by Anastasia Steele from Fifty Shades.
Anyway, the movie I watched last Friday was not about Heaven (who by this time had died in an accident), but her daughter Annie, who had the hots for a guy she believed to be her half-brother. Thankfully, given Heaven's fling with her own uncle, the guy after whom Annie lusts is not a blood relative after all. This makes things so much better. As an aside, I am now wondering why the characters in this keep-it-in-the-family saga all look like airbrushed models, instead of the drooling oafs in Deliverance.
By way of background, Heaven was conceived when her own mother Leigh was raped by her stepfather Tony. Leigh was only about thirteen or fourteen. Tony is clearly a Polanski-ish child-grooming, predatory nonce. After an icky life, Heaven moves in with Tony and the woman who is her biological grandmother, and starts banging someone who turns out to be her uncle. At some time in the salacious series, Heaven (at the time pregnant with Annie), gets felt up by Tony. Further down the track, we see the orphaned and injured Annie sent to Tony's House of Fun to recuperate, and she also gets groped by the lecherous old perve.
And, last Friday, I sat in delirium on the lounge watching the dreck. I am guessing the movie's budget went on sets or hiring of stately homes, because the staircase in the mansion was magnificent; but there was not much left for anything else. I say this because Tony is played by Jason Priestly (yeah, Brandon Walsh in 90210), and in order to 'age' him for the older Tony, it is obvious the hair and makeup staff upended a 2 kilo bag of flour over his head. This movie is one of a series, as it turns out, and he would have played a younger Tony in the earlier ones. Will I watch the earlier ones? I don't know. As I mentioned, Heaven is seriously one of the most irritating protagonists I have ever encountered, and I doubt being translated into a movie will make her any more fetching.
I needed to cleanse my mind after viewing this, so indulged in some guilty pleasures that were less creepy - I YouTubed Bay City Rollers clips (yes, I know their drummer has been done for offences of a sexual nature, too). One of my favourites is Rock and Roll Love Letter, and it contains the lyrical magnificence that is: 'I see an ancient rhythm in a man's genetic code...'. Clearly, there are not enough references to deoxyribonucleic acid in songs these days.
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