Poison Ivy (1992)

Sylvie Cooper (Sara Gilbert) is an introverted loner. Her mother Georgie (Cheryl Ladd) is sickly. Sylvie rebels against her conservative TV commentator father Darryl (Tom Skerritt). She is taken with the sexy trashy new girl (Drew Barrymore) who has a fake Ivy tattoo on her thigh. Sylvie befriends the new girl and gives her the name Ivy. Ivy starts insinuating into Sylvie's life causing trouble in her family and even seducing her father.Drew was shedding her child star status at the time. This is overwrought and pulpy. It's Lolita being even trashier. Gilbert and Barrymore are great. There is a young Leonardo DiCaprio in a minor role. This is trashy art that teases an erotic thriller. I can certainly understand how this could be dismissed but it has some pulpy fun.

Poison Ivy is now on my favorite movie list.The reminds me of a teen drama with a thriller twist. The film starts off with Sylvie discussing Ivy as Ivy swings on a rope. A little boy then runs over to tell them that a dog has been hit by a car. As everyone there is gathered around the dog a large stick swings down on the dog. The person with the stick is Ivy. Was the kill meant for good? this shows us that this girl is slightly psychotic. The next day she and Sylvie become friends and after Ivy is given a ride home by Sylvie and her dad, Best friends. Soon she even moves in with them. But halfway into the film trying to be with the father. And even goes as far as pushing Georgie (Sylvie's mom) off the balcony and claiming it to be suicide. Sylvie becomes suspicious of Ivy when she starts humming the song Sylvie wrote for her mother. A song that was playing the day she was killed. After Ivy wreaks Georgie's car and puts Sylvie into the hospital and blames the accident on her, Sylvie is sure Ivy is no good and tries to warn her dad but he doesn't listen.Sylvie breaks out of the hospital and returns home to Ivy and her father. Sylvie flees and her dad and Ivy chase after her but her dad forces Ivy to return inside. When she goes upstairs Sylvie is there waiting and Sylvie pushes Ivy off the ledge but Ivy grabs her necklace telling her that if she goes then so does Sylvie but the necklace breaks and Ivy plummets to the ground and dies. If you're into crazy girl thriller movies then you'll love this film. I've only seen this one and The Secret Society but I plan to get them all.

A horrible script horribly acted makes for a horrible movie. That sums up Poison Ivy. The story, in addition to being quite stupid, is incredibly boring. There's no drama, no excitement. Everything is sadly predictable. And sadly terrible. There's also no passion in this supposed erotic thriller. Sparks don't fly, the whole thing is rather tame. After setting up its rather absurd premise the movie fizzles out very, very quickly. It's a movie which never comes alive.So what's the story? Well, there's this teenage girl Sylvie. She's a bit of a weirdo, a total loner, no friends to be seen anywhere. Then we meet another girl. She's the trashy Lolita type. And she's a real mystery, doesn't even have a name. Sylvie calls her Ivy, that name sticks and before you know it Ivy has moved in with Sylvie's family. Never mind that they know absolutely nothing about this girl. Also don't mind the fact that spending a few minutes with this girl is enough to see that she quite clearly pings the crazy meter. No, they just let her move in and assume everyone will live happily ever after. But Ivy is a bad, bad girl. So she spins her web of deceit and Sylvie and her parents fall right into the trap. Unfortunately nothing about this proves to be at all entertaining and the movie goes from bad to worse to much, much worse.Along with the lousy story we get rather lousy acting. Drew Barrymore plays Ivy and never convinces as the teenage seductress. She comes across as a child trying real hard to be an adult and failing quite miserably at it. Sara Gilbert also shows a lack of maturity in the role of Sylvie. I suppose it's Sylvie we're supposed to sympathize with after Ivy starts screwing things up but the way Gilbert plays the part it's real hard to feel anything for the character. She comes across as a petulant, and rather clueless, brat. The adults in the movie fare no better. Playing Sylvie's not so dear old Dad is Tom Skerritt who never for a moment seems comfortable. He delivers his lines in such a forced, unnatural way it's rather jarring. Meanwhile Cheryl Ladd spends the movie in a drug-induced haze playing Sylvie's very ill mother. Well at least she has something of an excuse for being so lifeless. The movie as a whole has no life, no spark or sizzle. It's a painful slog, thoroughly undramatic, most of the time quite laughable. The story is dumb, the dialogue is atrocious, the performances are wretched. This movie is poisonous indeed.

Poison Ivy is set in Los Angeles where Sylvie Cooper (Sara Gilbert) has been summoned to the principal's office at school for phoning in a bomb threat to her father's television station, there she meets & talks to the mysterious & alluring Ivy (Drew Barrymore). Almost complete opposites the mild mannered & unadventurous Sylvie & the overt & sexually active Ivy strike up a firm relationship & quickly become best friends, Ivy practically moves into Sylvie's giant mansion where her suicidal mother Georgie (Cheryl Ladd) is very ill with emphysema. Ivy starts to take control of the Cooper's lives, Ivy starts to seduce Sylvie's rich father Daryl (Tom Skerritt) & begins to rip the Cooper family apart...Co-written & directed by Katt Shea I have to say that I thought Poison Ivy was a really limp thriller that offered no surprises or genuine tension, why exactly has it spawned three sequels & counting? I suppose the biggest problem with Poison Ivy is the lethargic & uninvolving script that has wafer thin character's you don't care about sleepwalk through the film. There's no passion here, no excitement, nothing to get the pulse racing, there are no big twists or turns & the entire thing is very predictable. It's never clear why Ivy targets the Cooper's, why she befriends Sylvie (before she finds out her dad's mega rich), nothing about Ivy's background is ever mentioned other than she lived with an Aunt & quite why Ivy wanted to ruin a good thing by wrecking the career of Daryl, killing Georgie & betraying Sylie is a complete mystery to me, I mean she had been all but adopted by the Cooper's as part of the family so why ruin it with no obvious benefit other than breaking a family up & making everyone hate her. With no background on Ivy & no apparent source of motivation it's hard to care to be quite honest. The sacking of Daryl from his job gets one short scene that feels like an afterthought & didn't seem to affect the story that much at all. Then there's the slow pace, things only start to pick up towards the end & it's not until past the hour mark when things turn really nasty & by then the films almost over. There's some poor attempts at psychology as Sylvie has to deal with her ill mother complete with ghostly hallucinations, there's the issue of peer pressure, betrayal, the idea that family is the most important thing in life & teenage rebellion but it's all just padding with little thought or effort going into it. I mean if the most extreme thing Ivy does to Sylvie for the first hour is pamper her dog too much then you know your in trouble.I must admit that I found Poison Ivy really tiresome to watch on a visual level as well, the opening scene of Ivy swinging through the air where she flicks her hair away from her face looks like it belongs in a cheap shampoo commercial. None of it is erotic or sexy & simply dressing Drew Barrymore up in a few tight outfits doesn't cut it, the sex scenes are tame & I am pretty sure Barrymore got a body double. There's one breast shot & one naked male butt & that's your lot. Personally I didn't find Barrymore attractive in this at all, her shallow pointless character & wooden acting combined to send me to sleep rather than send shivers down my spine. There's no violence to speak of & even the 'Unrated' version doing the rounds on DVD is very tame by todays standards as teen flicks such as American Pie (1999) & The Hangover (2009) are far more explicit.With a supposed budget of about $3,000,000 this flopped at the box-office & you can see why, there's nothing here other than for Drew Barrymore fans & considering this was one of her first films she probably didn't have many at the time. The acting is pretty poor, I thought Barrymore was very wooden with no menace or sexuality about her performance at all while Tom Skerritt looks bored.Poison Ivy is a terrible erotic thriller that is neither erotic or thrilling in any way as far as I am concerned, a real damp squib of a limp wristed film that delivers nothing. Followed by Poison Ivy II (1996), Poison Ivy: The New Seduction (1997) & Poison Ivy: The Secret Society (2008).