Natural Enemy (1996)

Such a frustrating disappointment

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

A text message at the very end, after the credits, tells us that adopted children get psychiatric problems a lot more than others.I wish I had seen that before the starting to watch - the early scenes show some really awful stuff. When she was 17, Sandy (Leslie Ann Warren) gave birth to Jeremy (William McNamara) but gave him up for adoption. The very first scene shows him setting fire to one of his adoptive parents! Much later, he says he has spent his whole life trying to understand why he wasn't good enough to keep. Inspite of the awfulness throughout the movie, it does raise all sorts of issues and deals with them well. It does help to have faultless acting from the whole cast, and excellent production and direction and appropriate locations - mainly a stunning house somewhere in Montreal (although the story says Boston and Dover.)I found it so hard to give a rating. Awfulness usually gets a 1 from me, but a second watching after reading the end message, requires a big rethink, so now it's a 9.

I picked up this DVD for a cheap price and love any movie which deals with adoption issues. The movie was exciting and well acted with some good dialog with black humor and some shocking scenes.Donald Sutherland was as always very good.I thought Lesley Ann Warren who played the unsuspecting birth mom did a good job expressing her emotions about her past and the secret she never told her husband.It is the first movie i've seen Christian Tessier who plays "Chris",and even though he only had a small role,I liked him and don't know why he's not in more films.William McNamara was very convincing in this film as "Jeremy" an angry adoptee who wreaked havoc on his blood relatives and their family.He looked so innocent but had no conscience,and gave a realistic and chilling performance.This film showed every negative aspect and emotion of being an adopted person. Everything from anger of being abandoned to genetic sexual attraction.Of course this is only a fictitious movie and not the reality of most adoptees. The end credits gave it's statistics about how troubled adopted kids are or can be,and gave extreme examples.I am adopted and understand how it feels to grow up with it.I was lucky to have a loving and supportive adoptive family and a good upbringing and this isn't always the case.However I still suffered the stigma of it and had my issues with it like we all do.The main problem I have with this movie was at the end where it boldly says that in most places adoption records are sealed.I found that offensive because the majority of searching adoptees want their medical info and wanna know where they came from(what their roots are)and have a right to know.This movie was made 11 years ago but today records are finally being opened more and more. I did enjoy the movie,but feel it was a bad representation of an adopted person.Still it is a very dramatic experience from all sides and there should be more movies about it.

Natural Enemy is not unlike a plethora of similar revenge type of movies involving a character with considerable "damaged goods" out to destroy those he feels is responsible for his twisted state.Here, William McNamara is the son of adopted parents who abused him and apparently ruined his life. To retaliate, McNamara has tracked down his natural parents and slowly begins to ruin their lives.While the story is uninspired, it does move at a fairly fast pace. While McNamara does not possess the emotional range of many other actors in his age group, he is fairly convincing here and does send a few chills our way.Perhaps the most disappointing element of the film is that, in its own way, it tries to shed light on the fact that many adopted children often grow up to be emotionally scarred for life, if not worse, (McNamara's character being an extreme example.) Although this is a noble undertaking, we can't respect the movie enough to care about this aspect of it. In addition, the movie falls way too short of taking itself seriously enough to double as a legitimate "message picture" in this regard.Ultimately, we are left with not a whole lot to think about.

This is one of the most hateful and cruel movies I've seen in a long time. Sadly I was duped into sticking with it, since Donald Sutherland's presence misleadingly gave it some credibility. [That's the last time that'll happen.]Lesley Ann Warren's character was annoyingly whiny and as stupid as they come. There were smarter characters than hers who were killed in the film. Thats just one of many things in this movie that made me ask, "Where is the justice?"Why is late-night cable so filled with sadistic garbage filled with pathological mayhem? Most of these films seem to have a particular problem with women, and seem to focus on them being terrorized and murdered. This film could have been every bit as suspenseful without being sick and twisted in the process. All it ends up doing is turning the viewer's stomach with its sickness, and insulting the viewer's intelligence.The cast is misleadingly good. My guess is that they BAGGED Sutherland first, and used him to lure the others like lemmings into this.I'm kicking myself for wasting time, giving this piece of garbage a chance.