Mommy's Little Girl (2016 TV Movie) User Reviews

Little girls should not play with fire

[Ed-Shullivan · 6/10 · 24 September 2019]

This is a disheartening story of a troubled young girl who is played admirably by the young actress Emma Hentschel who plays an 11 year old school girl named Sadie Connell with a very troubled mind. Young Sadie's mind plays tricks on her that she is not loved when in fact her mother Theresa Malcolms (Fiona Gublemann) and her step father Aaron Myers (James Gallanders) are deeply in love and want to join their two families together. Aaron has a teenage son of his own named Josh (Mikael Conde) who quickly identifies that his younger step sister is not simply quirky but quite troubled and he brings to his father Aaron's attention some of the strange things he has witnessed about his younger step sister Sadie.

This is not a suspenseful made for TV film, nor is the young Sadie believable as a cold-hearted and premeditated psycho killer, but once the family comes to terms that Sadie (and her parents) are in dire need of some family counselling and psychiatric help the tail end of the film becomes more realistic and the closing few scenes in the film remind us that not all families live a normal life, and yet other families struggle with mental illness and how to cope with it.

The film may not end up on your preferred personal happy ending theme, but it will leave everyone with somethings to consider and paying more attention within our own family dynamics that require family discussions on whether to seek external support(s).

I give this made for TV film a 6 out of 10 simply for the decent and somewhat realistic way that the film handled the mental illness issue.

The Lil' Devil

[lavatch · 6/10 · 11 July 2020]

Little Sadie was raised by her grandparents after her father Kyle died in auto crash and her mom Theresa became an alcoholic. Now, ten years later, Theresa has recovered and has a nice fiancé, Aaron. Both Theresa and Aaron welcome Sadie into her home. But they have no sense of the extent to which they are receiving damaged goods.

The filmmakers never made it entirely clear what happened to little Sadie while she was raised by her grandparents. There is only a hint that they abused and tormented the child. But the result is a vindictiveness that is a combination of paranoia and lashing out at others with a lethal dosage of rage and violence. Little Sadie will be complicit in deaths of the two grandparents...and her poor elementary school teacher.

The character of Theresa was especially well-written and performed by the actress. The mother was so caring that she had a blind spot for the danger signs about the child. The child performer was also outstanding in a multi-dimensional character development.

Still, this film was disappointing in the gloom hanging over the family from start to finish. Grandma Elena was actually making a reasonable request for compensation after raising the child for ten years, having the kid taken away from her. It never occurred to the usually sensitive Theresa to think of her mother-in-law in this way. But the major flaw of this movie was the lack of clear motivation for the child's pathology.

The saddest part of the film was the relationship of Sadie and her homeroom teacher, Miss Goldin. This was a caring instructor who was starting to recognize the child's aberrant behavior and might have been able to get her the help she so desperately needed. Instead, Miss Goldin is the victim of a diabolical plan of murder hatched by the ten-year-old.

The mantra of little Sadie is a warning she gives to her enemies: "Follow temptations and you deserve what you get." If that adage has any truth to it, sadistic Sadie gets exactly what she deserves: a long life ahead of her in a nut house.

A TV movie to pass the time...

[pinocchietto · 6/10 · 12 July 2020]

Usual a TV movie where there is a mentally ill bad person trying to kill his enemies. Eventually these stories end with the bad person in spychiatry or in prison. The story is similar to all the films of this genre, the only thing that changes is that this time the main villain is a young girl. Movies to pass the time if there is nothing better on TV.

Not That Bad of a Film

[cjwhite-31645 · 19 June 2019]

Their are a lot of positive notes; Pretty Good Storyline Likeable/Relatable Characters Not Bloody/Gorey Descent Acting for a TV Movie Little to no Goofs Filming Wise The only downside is the ending, where Sadie's true nature is revealed and she is committed to a Psychiatric Hospital/Ward in the last five minutes of the film. But the ending does have one of those break out and sob moments. Because in the end Sadie just wanted to be loved.

Poorly written contrived story, other movies have done this so much better

[AlexAtkinUK · 2/10 · 16 September 2017]

While the plot starts off fair enough, child looked after (abused) by her grandparents because her mother was an alcoholic, it all goes downhill from there. Its not even clear WHY they were so mean to her, did they resent looking after her? Its not entirely clear.

The acting by the little girl is so incredibly forced most of the time, you get little hints that she probably CAN act but the writing and directing of the story never gives her a chance.

For most of the movie the people she is killing very much deserved it, they pushed her to it. But as it devolves into killing innocent people it goes down hill fast.

The killing of her teacher who has nut allergies was especially contrived and it was made so obvious it was coming long before she did anything to earn it, my cat could have recognised the signs.

Dragging us through the character finding out what an epi-pen is and oh look, she just happened to be tasting wedding cake with marzipan soon after and there HAPPENS to still be some in the fridge later. :rolls eyes:

Except anyone with a severe nut allergy wouldn't eat something without asking first, let alone marzipan that you can usually smell a mile away. Then the fact Almond allergies are pretty rare anyway even amongst nut allergy sufferers, yet the symptoms come on so fast she is unable to defend herself from a 10 year old girl to call 911? Give me a break!

Its such a shame, as other movies have done so much better with similar material.

not good enough

[SnoopyStyle · 5/10 · 10 May 2020]

Sadie Connell grew up under her strict, heartless grandmother Elana and they're hiding a secret. Elana's son had died ten years earlier. After three years sober with a better life, Sadie's mother Theresa Malcolms (Fiona Gubelmann) has come to take her back. She moves in with Theresa and Aaron Myers with Aaron's angry teenage son Josh.

This is a Lifetime movie. Creepy little girls can be effective in horrors. That's what this movie should aim for but it's a Lifetime movie. It doesn't know how. It's trying to be a thriller but this doesn't have thrills. It's functional and I like the final conflict. The little girl is pretty good. Nevertheless, this is not good enough.

****

[edwagreen · 10/10 · 4 June 2016]

The Bad Seed, move over. After a child is finally reunited with her alcoholic-free mother, we see the young lass resorting to murder and absolute mayhem as she feels that everyone is against her and is trying to separate her from her mother.

Young Miss Hentschel is mesmerizing as the totally disturbed child, brought up in her home where she pushed her grandfather, an abuser, down the steps to his death and remains with her grandmother, a Frances Sternahagen look-alike, who wants compensation for the years she took care of the child and winds up pushed off a cliff by the monster child.

Made fun of in school by other children, the child imagines that her teacher wants to send her to a school for bad girls and she does away with the teacher as well. How come Miss Golden never changed the seating arrangements in the classroom to move our traumatized youngster from the boy and girl who constantly harassed her?

Find drama dealing with emotional disturbance and the tragedy that pursues.

Conradt still the mistress of Lifetime

[mgconlan-1 · 8/10 · 20 March 2016]

Last night Lifetime presented two recent TV-movie productions back to back, first the March 19 "world premiere" of "Mommy's Little Girl" and then a repeat of last Saturday's "world premiere," The Stepchild. I had high hopes for "Mommy's Little Girl" as soon as I saw Christine Conradt's name among the writing credits — she came up with the "original" story and co-wrote the actual script with Mark Sanderson, while her frequent collaborator Curtis James Crawford directed — and I wasn't disappointed: though both the overall premise and several specific incidents are heavily, shall we say, "borrowed" from Maxwell Anderson's play "The Bad Seed" (and the marvelous film Mervyn LeRoy made from it in 1956 — at least it's a marvelous film if you stop watching it at the point where the play ends and avoid the tacked-on ending the Production Code Administration insisted on), "Mommy's Little Girl" is a great suspense thriller. Maybe it's not an all-time classic but it holds the attention, it entertains and gives us the nice clean dirty frissons of fun for which we (at least I) go to Lifetime in the first place.

It begins at the home of Elana Connell (Deborah Grover), an insanely (literally) moralistic woman who for the last 10 years has raised her grandchild Sadie (Emma Hentschel) after Sadie's mom Theresa (Fiona Gubelmann, top-billed) flamed out on alcohol (and possibly drugs as well, though the Conradt-Sanderson script isn't specific about exactly what her addictions were) and the authorities were going to put Sadie in the foster-care system (the word "care" there should really be in quotes!) if grandma didn't take her. Grandma is a flinty type who lives in a clapboard house — one could readily imagine both the house and Deborah Grover being models for Grant Wood — and she's devastated when Theresa shows up at her door, announces she's clean, sober and engaged to a well-to-do toy company executive named Aaron Myers (James Gallanders, one of the few genuinely attractive men in a Lifetime movie who isn't stuck playing a villain!) who's already got a son, Josh (Mikael Conde), from an earlier wife. For the first act or so it's not altogether apparent just where the Conradt-style intrigue is going to come from, but it soon develops that Sadie has become a spoiled-brat psycho who'll do just about anything to get her way, from ratting on Josh when she catches him drinking in the backyard to responding to two class bullies at school — she's never been to school before because her grandma home-schooled her — Dylan (Sam Ashe Arnold, a cute tow-headed kid who'll probably grow up to be a heartbreaker) and Alliree (Mia Kechichian) — by stealing a box of Dylan's action-figure toys, using a cigarette lighter she inherited from her grandfather (John Koensgen) to melt the face off one of them, and taping the mutilated toy to the inside of Dylan's locker door (how did she open it?). It's about this time {spoiler alert!] that we learn Sadie had previously killed when he tried to take her down to the basement for "punishment" once too often, and as the story unfolds she also knocks off her grandma and her seemingly nice and caring teacher, Miss Goldin (Alix Sideris) in a scene obviously ripped off from "The Little Foxes/" Not only is the overall plot strongly reminiscent of "The Bad Seed" but director Crawford probably screened it for Emma Hentschel, since her portrayal of Sadie is clearly patterned on the superb little-bitch performance of Patty McCormick in "The Bad Seed", all gooey sweet smiles on the surface and psychopathic rage underneath. Though I might have preferred a dark ending along the lines of Anderson's original for "The Bad Seed" (in which "bad girl" Rhoda Penmark and her father are left together after the death of her mom, the last person who knew the secret that innocent-looking Rhoda was really a "bad seed" psycho killer), and there are a few of the plot holes typical of Conradt's work, for the most part "Mommy's Little Girl" is a solidly entertaining thriller that's helped by the fact that we know exactly who the culprit is and therefore the suspense isn't over whodunit but how the characters are going to find out who we know is doin' it.

So so

[haroot_azarian · 22 March 2021]

My take from this movie waa to feel sorry for Sadie but also hate her at the same time! An abused little girl and also bullied at school and yet she could not disinguish between bad people and good people who wanted to help her! The looney bin was the best place for her, because obviously her mother was not capable of raising and helping her!