Lionsgate may have dropped the ball with their DVD release of the Welsh import "Daddy’s Girl" by renaming it "Cravings". Since
it was originally released in 2006, the American distributor was
probably just trying to capitalize on the belief that actress Jaime
Winstone ("Donkey Punch") maybe the next great British
actress. Horror DVD’s are probably the most rented and it being
Lionsgate’s bread and butter, the renaming allow it to capture the
largest audience. This proves to be misleading because Cravings is not so much thriller or horror feature than Alicia Silverstone’s The Crush. To its credit, Cravings does take the Electra complex to a new level of creepy.
Stephen (Richard Harrington) is a psychotherapist who is just six weeks
removed from his wife’s suicide. As a welcome back present, his first
new patient is Nina (Winstone), a girl who had slit her wrist on
"accident." She claims to just be going through that cutting stage of
adolescence, but Stephen believes that because she drinks her blood,
there is a far more disturbing problem. As Stephen becomes closer to
Nina’s mother (Louise Delamere), Nina begins to lash out at everyone who
can offer her a taste of the crimson. Being too involved with the case,
and still struggling with the grief of his wife’s death, Stephen must
stop Nina’s behavior before it cost him his sanity and more.
Cravings is
not about vampires in the traditional sense, but it chooses to wait
till the one-hour mark before it disappoints the viewer who was hoping
for paranormal action. There is nothing great about the film’s direction
and the script had no clue on how to write the characters beyond
Stephen and the ghost-whispering plumber. Because of this, the story is
about Stephen losing his sanity, and the blood sucker with daddy issues
is secondary.
 |
| moviesdb.co.uk |
As for Winstone’s performance, she offers up her ability to be dynamic,
but with no explanation of how she was ever at the low end of the evil
spectrum, the script wasted her talent. She is a lovable psycho (okay
this critic does not care much for poodles), and like the box art
implies, she should have been the focus of the picture.
The American release of Daddy’s Girl is nothing but false
advertising to try to promote a possible up-and-coming actress. It is
written to poorly to be a great psychological thriller, and it is
nothing close to being considered horror. If this lands on cable, it
might be worth killing sometime or as background noise, but for those
who have an itch for an entertaining DVD, this will not satisfy their
cravings.
