Dying for A Daughter (2020 TV Movie) User Reviews

Your typical Lifetime movie

[Top_Dawg_Critic · 6/10 · 10 November 2020]

It's basically watching a soap opera with a start and end to one entire "dramatic" story.

The overbearing and constant score was very annoying. Zero music was needed in more than half of the entire scores runtime.

The acting for the most part was sub par - unconvincing and/or over exaggerated, but I'm sure that's mostly well-seasoned TV writer and director Fred Olen Ray's failure to direct his scenes and cast properly.

His directing in this one felt very amateurish, that the entire film seemed like an independent low budget amateur filmmaker's production. It felt very phony and unconvincing. The story has been done many times before, and much better, so not sure why we needed a "soap opera" version, that was predictable start to end.

Pacing and runtime were decent. If you have nothing better to watch, I guess this one is OK. It's a generous 6/10 from me

Not a complete waste of time, however.......

[Chartreuse1 · 5/10 · 20 November 2020]

Refreshing change to see star Brittany Underwood playing the baddie. Unfortunately, even her acting chops can't rescue this movie from terrible acting and a bad script. The best part was the ending scene and even that was overacted. Keep on trying, Lifetime! One of these days, you'll get it right!

No reference checks required

[ThunderKing6 · 6/10 · 11 November 2023]

Eye candy movie.

November 11th after the 11th hour in year 2023rd.

Genre:

Family drama, mental illness, feminist.

What was this tv movie about?:

It was about a syco femmy. Supposedly wanting to be back in her daughter's life. So she Loki's her way into the house.

The story and the production overview:

The mother looked like the Shehulk actress.

They story was interesting. The execution of the film was fine.

The acting wasn't bad in most parts in my opinion.

From my perspective the mother was foolish for not doing reference check and leaving her dot alone right away with a stranger.

The fed lady was a tool. She potential almost got the mother killed because she couldn't just go to the cafe.

Overall a good film nevertheless for its tier level.

Highlight:

Nothing really... Eye candy was alright I guess.

Moral:

Do reference checks and unlock your vast intuition.

Rating:

It was fine.

Final words:

The ending could have been better.

Idiotic

[LaverneandShirleysucks · 1/10 · 14 May 2022]

Where to start? The psycho nurse struts around in a slinky silk black robe while sipping red wine with the mother's husband on her first day on the job and the wife just stands there like a moron instead of calling her out and firing her butt on the spot.

Later on she sees an 8x10 framed photo of psycho nurse and her daughter on daughter's nightstand and seeing how inappropriate it is, asks about it and accepts the lame excuse she's given about it.

By this point, any mother would have sent the nurse packing but the moron mother is too clueless.

Then as these Lifetime movies go, whoever wises up to the psycho is quickly eliminated. This hapless victim is strangled in her car right in front of the hospital entrance in broad daylight and even honks her horn as she takes her final breath and no one is around to notice!

There are security cameras all over these parking lots so it's a stupid murder scene to have done because there's no way the psycho would have been able to succeed in it because CCTV would've caught her entering the car and driving it away.

By the time the psycho poisoned the idiot mother with soy milk that she's allergic to and also the husband so she can fake intimate pics with him to set him up to an affair and then strangle another person in the house, I was done and just FF to the inevitable Lifetime climax where the psycho gets her due.

I love how they always give a grand speech with an explanation of their motives while holding a gun on the victims. I always find that part entertaining and funny.

At least in this one the psycho gets killed instead of getting away like in some of these films, but it's another 1 star Lifetime film because of the stupidity of characters and absurd murder scenes.

People drop dead after 5 seconds of strangulation lol. It takes a hell of a lot longer and a lot of strength to strangle someone, but in these films the victims always fall like anchors 2 seconds after the cords are placed around their necks. Puh-lease!!

Just bad

[shona_916 · 1/10 · 11 November 2020]

Everything was just bad. The writing, the directing and the acting. I just can't believe someone paid money to have this movie made and be put on TV. I don't understand why all this money keeps getting wasted.

Couldn't get any worse

[momsipadonly · 1/10 · 15 November 2020]

Simply the worst. Horrible acting start to finish if I wasn't so Covid trapped and bored would never have bothered to finish watching.

Typical third grader script

[haroot_azarian · 1 February 2021]

So I quite like Underwood, but she is just terrible at playing psycho villians, her facial expressions are just God aweful! Also there were many scenes where smimey Tom deserved a scillet to the upside of his head! If I had been Sam I would have thrown him out a long time ago!

A mother's secret

[coltras35 · 6/10 · 28 July 2023]

On a mountain road in the dead of night mother Samantha (Melanie Nelson) and her 10-year-old daughter Cassie (Scarlett Roselynn) are involved in a car accident. It runs off the road and Sam is relatively unscathed but Cassie is badly injured and ends up needing a wheelchair. While at a hospital undergoing a large blood transfusion, the hospital staff learn that Cassie was adopted, which causes a nurse named Margaret Smith (Brittany Underwood) to get the job of live-in nurse to take care of Cassie after she's released from the hospital. She does this by impersonating Rachel, another nurse from her agency, and of course she's up to no good.

What occurs after this is typical Hallmark thriller. A psycho nurse nurses someone's child, plans to take over, become the mother and get the husband. It's a well worn idea/plot which efficiently acted, however what lifts this up from average is Brittany Underwood's performance. She's beautiful, yet deadly and conveys this so well.

Is it really hard to make this better

[tamrbrwn-59647 · 3/10 · 18 June 2023]

It's bad enough the poor little girl has a absent negligent mom that is to busy to even take time for her daughter who is being over drugged and put to sleep all day but then she has a weak needy doesn't know when to stop giving attention loser dad this weird nurse that's supposed to love the little girls keeps her drugged while she works on the dad that's not worth the time she is over doing it with the sultry trying to be Seductive and sexy a real nurse wouldn't be walking around with no clothes on morning afternoon and night so they should know she's not professional and they should have let her go right away I would have she her hair is usually red so now it's blond why and then there's the friend that always finds something out and calls to say I need to meet up with you it's important without saying what it is and even if she did everyone's phones are unlocked and it would have got erased the same old stories over and over like the dad said your the nurse not the help she wouldn't be cooking in my house all day I would make sure meals were cooked for my child but it's to hard for anyone to do that with these nice large homes with big kitchens the little girl while have pretended to take the medicine so she could pay attention to what's going on she is basically a seat filler actor not a main part. I watched some of this stopped watched a little more stopped again the nurse is supposed to be with the child at all times why she's a live in confuses me she is not terminal you come in the morning and leave when a parent gets back her robotic movements are annoying like she's a android i also find it hard to believe as skinny and little as she is she can choke out 2 way larger people it's really easy to grab her hair and you don't have to give a over deranged look to be deranged do all the friends have to be killed the police never seem concerned until the end or the movie when the fight is over.did she really let that puny chick beat her up.

A sad, dull little family

[gymnckv · 3/10 · 3 August 2023]

Brittany Underwood is delightful in this. I think she played the wonderfully robotic, murderous pastry chef in one of the campiest, fun OTT daytime movies. She doesn't disappoint here. Otherwise this dull film sucked.

What a sad little family.

I didn't like any of the characters in this. They are a depressing little collection.

Sam is a jealous, self-centered and neglectful mother. She doesn't cook for her child. She can't trust her husband's wandering eye. She overworks to avoid her family.

Tom is a cheater who keeps a gun in an unlocked dresser drawer. He is critical of his wife - he tells her that she doesn't bother to cook (why doesn't HE cook?), she doesn't wear sexy satin robes. But he does do dishes.

Nurse: Is your husband home?

Sam: (Looks taken aback).

Erm, why is that such a shocking question?

Nurse: "He's very handsome." Wife: "A lot of women think so".

Really? He's not that attractive, mediocre at best.

The actress playing the child has adorable freckles but there's something off about her. She seems much older than 10 years Like maybe she's around 16, just short. Lines like "She's angelic" and "you're lucky to have such a perfect little girl" don't ring true.

The detective, when told a deranged nurse has kidnapped a 10 year child just brushes it off and leaves, saying she has more important things to do. WTF?

Its bad, just go with it.

[hgibson-247-49717 · 8/10 · 30 November 2020]

I think everyone is being too serious. Is the acting, writing, directing bad? Yes. Is the score too ominous, ever-present, and hokey? Yes. Is the story full of inconsistencies, plot holes, and characters who are way too eager to overshare about their co-workers to perfect strangers?! Haha, YES! I found this flick to be fun for what it is. I mean, c'mon, it's a Lifetime movie with a ridiculous plot. I know occasionally they hit a home run but most are junk food TV. This one was just a bit higher in trans fat than the rest! My only wish was that it was a bit longer so it could have been fleshed out a bit more. And once, just once, I want to see the bad girl win! Oh well. It was good for a laugh.

Great acting!

[vaundrem · 10/10 · 28 November 2020]

Karina Segura was great! Her acting was believable. Hope to see more of her in thriller movies!

Anyone else was rooting for the blonde?

[imdb-25288 · 8/10 · 18 January 2021]

I surfed onto this in progress. The first thing that struck me was how the blonde wasn't using that annoying voice fry I'd expected from her. That took me aback, so I paused to watch a scene then surfed out, only to come right back after a few min. I must say the prettier Shakira look-alike gave a strong performance.

Now, I read the other reviews. People don't seem to have watched Lifetime movies. You don't rate it like a real movie but you rate it compared to the rest of crap this channel puts out. And this was not bad. I found the platinum woman compelling to watch. (Brittany Underwood... is she supposed to be famous? The name rings a bell but I couldn't place her, even after going down her filmography and PS: this isn't listed there!)

I liked when she killed the woman in the car, she barely exerted herself. (I am guessing that was direction?) Sometimes she looked younger than her (32?) age and sometimes she looked 42, like when she went berserk killing the welfare check woman.

What else can I say? It's a Lifetime movie, you don't take them serious. It was well lit. Oh and the mother was so annoying, from the get-go you had to root for the bad girl. Or am I the only 1? Why can't dumb movie channels like Lifetime give us what we want already? Imagine the precedent this could have set: she gets away with all the murders at the end! Come on, we all wanted that! i mean come on: the Hays Code is long over, so act like it! I mean what is this, the ABC Family channel resurrected and crossed with Hallmark? Have some guts, Lifetime and help us murder-and-get-away-with it via proxy. None of us gonna murder anyone, all of us have a couple dozen peeps on our hit list. (Particularly now!) Give us what we want or else: we change channels. Lifetime totally lost an opportunity to make headlines the next day with the social media being all like "WTF?" and other channels going copycat for the (diluted) same effect. Oh, well!

For the bad part: we aren't told at the end if she's really the girl's mother. I say yes. Also worse: the casting of the girl. Nothing against the girl, per se, but against the terrible casting director and choice: this girl was too old and too precocious. It would have made for a more interesting story if the girl had the (sorely needed) "angelical" quality. Think "Gracie" from The Nanny. The kid didn't need to be a 6 year old, but she definitely needed more vulnerability factor, to put the viewer a bit more on edge (for those that know how to "get into a movie" and pretend it's real). Also she wasn't that experienced an actress for the part, such as at the Byrd Cafe when she says "really?" after Blondie told her the story of what happened to her baby daughter. There was nothing behind that word, substance-wise, and the Gracie actress had her character down pat and acting chops in droves.

All in all, it's probably a 7/10 for LifeTime level of non-movies, this is pretty good so I'm bumping it to an 8/10, for Blondie's performance only. Does she moonlight as Shakira's double in her spare time? She's so much prettier, and her platinum-ish hair gave her creepy vibes to perfection for her character. Hope to see her in something else soon.