Adopting Terror (2012)

Good concept, poorly executed.

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

One of the things you can count on with Sean Astin is that he will give you a great performance no matter how lousy the script or dialogue. This is a made for TV Lifetime film with the expected quality. Tim (Sean Astin) and Cheryl (Samaire Armstrong) adopt a bay girl. The film implies Tim has some male issues.Along with the baby girl, they also get as a bonus the murderous biological father (Brendan Fehr) as a stalker wanting his bay back, one that the state took away. The action builds as expected, including the Lifetime twist.Lifetime fans will love it.I am less enthusiastic.

In order for me to really like a movie (or a book), I have to care about the characters. I want to empathize with them. In this case, I didn't, and ended up liking the bad boy more than the two "good guys" (who are, together, perhaps the most boringly flat couple I have ever seen.) The plot was so predictable, I knew what the supposed twist was going to be as soon as I saw her walk onto the screen. The only part I really enjoyed was watching the sexy villain stalk everyone and look menacing. He can come stalk me, if he likes.The wife, Cheryl, was a vapid character, and the actress who played her should learn not to overact. And Sam Gamgee. Well...never mind. It was just poor casting all around, except for the lovely bad boy, who didn't really have to say anything anyway.I gave it 3 stars, just because of him. If you have nothing, I mean nothing, else to do on a Sunday evening, perhaps watch this. You will be missing nothing if you pass it by.

This thriller is a good one since you don't realize through 3/4 of the film that it is actually a thriller.You will first come to view the police and adoption agency both inadequate in providing for protection when an adopting couple begin to be immediately harassed by the biological father. Their inability to do anything to ameliorate the situation is shocking and shows what's wrong with the adoption system. Of course, this leads to further mayhem for all concerned.You will begin to suspect that something is terribly amiss when the doctor in charge of the agency is murdered. It is at this point that the movie becomes a thriller with the real mother coming out of the wood-work and that in itself is a definite shocker.

"Adopting Terror" is an intense and rather confusing melodrama which has two pages listed on IMDb.com, one a pre-production page that does not identify it as a TV-movie — were they hoping for a theatrical release and sold it to Lifetime when they didn't get one? — and one a post-release page but one which doesn't identify many of the actors, including star Sean Astin, John Astin's son. The plot: Tim Broadbent (Sean Astin, a stocky guy of medium height who doesn't really look that much like his dad, John Astin of "The Addams Family") and his wife Cheryl (who appears to have been played by Kristen Quintrall — the IMDb.com pages list her character as "Nikki" and this suggests a last-minute script revision by writers Micho Rutare, who also directed, and Nik Frank-Lehrer) adopt a few-months-old baby who's been in state custody. They do this through something called the Community First Adoption Agency, headed by Dr. Ziegler (Michael Gross), and the social worker assigned to the case to supervise the adoption and recommend whether it should be made permanent at the final hearing is a willowy young (younger than Cheryl!) white woman named Fay Hopkins (Monet Mazur).What the Broadbents don't know but we do — at least we do if we watched this movie from the beginning (a couple of people who posted to IMDb.com about it didn't and therefore were confused) — is that the baby, Mona, was taken away from her parents in the first place and made a war of the state because she was living with her dad, Kevin Anderson (the tall, dark and sexy Brendan Fehr) when Child Protective Services got a call that she was being neglected, and when their worker (an African-American, like so many voice-of-reason authority figures in Lifetime movies) came over, Kevin shot her — presumably non-fatally, since he was convicted only of simple assault and was paroled in less than a year — then was ambushed by police outside the apartment building where he was living and arrested, while the baby was taken by the state and put in foster care until the Broadbents saw her picture online and initiated adoption proceedings.The Broadbents are having Mona's one-year birthday party in a local park (there's a mention that this story takes place in San Diego but no recognizable San Diego locations appear) when Kevin crashes the party and takes out his own camera (a disposable film camera rather than the digital ones the Broadbents and Cheryl's parents are using, which clearly symbolizes the class differences between them) and takes Mona's picture. From then on Kevin stalks the Broadbents, and when Tim tries to turn the tables and stalk Kevin at his house (where he noticed 8" x 10" blow-ups of his photos of Mona on the wall), Kevin turns that around and gets a restraining order against him. The Broadbents go to Dr. Ziegler and ask for information on contacting Mona's birth mother, and are told there's nothing he can do because it was a closed adoption and mom's privacy needs to be protected — whereupon a furious Tim asks Ziegler how Kevin Anderson got their address if the information was supposed to be so confidential. Kevin shows up outside the home of a couple who are friends of the Broadbents, whose son bites Mona on the forehead during a play session — and a smarmily apologetic Fay tells the Broadbents on her next visit that she's going to have to photograph that and put it in their file.Fay's rather smarmy manner — plus the fact that she's white on a network where virtually all the legitimate members of the helping professions are Black — makes us suspicious of her from the get-go, but about two-thirds of the way through the film the big reversal comes: Fay, who claimed to have masters' degrees in both social work and clinical psychology, is really an impostor; she's Mona's biological mother and she and Kevin are involved in a plot to derail the Broadbents' chances at legally adopting Mona so they can take her back for themselves. Kevin breaks into Dr. Ziegler's office by disguising himself as a janitor and kills him just when he's about to stumble on the real identity of Mona's birth mother (he's Web-surfing on his laptop for the information when he's croaked), and before that Kevin showed up at the hospital where the Broadbents were supposed to get Mona her childhood immunizations, kidnapped Mona but then gave her back when he was caught (once again he was in disguise, this time wearing the green scrubs the hospital itself issued to its own staff).Though "Adopting Terror" is a bit melodramatic in the usual Lifetime manner, and it suffers from their decision to cut back on the soft-core porn that used to be the highlight of many a Lifetime movie (we only get a brief, furtive, shadowy glimpse of Kevin and Fay doing it, and they're fully clothed), it's also a quite competent if unoriginal thriller that gets better as it goes along, the exposition gets out of the way and Rutare's direction gets tighter and more effective.