Review: 'The Bad Seed' Blu-ray

In 1954, William March published a book about a child who kills not because she's an invading alien, like the kids in The Midwich Cuckoos, or because she's the antichrist, like the kid in The Omen, but because she's entitled, covetous, and completely immoral, like Donald Trump. Because of its all-too-human monster, The Bad Seed was a genuinely scary novel, and with its tight storytelling and clearly defined characters, it was ripe for adaptation into an equally chilling movie.

 The problem was it was a little too ripe. Producer/director Mervyn LeRoy should have sat on The Bad Seed until Hollywood was ready to make a picture about children killing children without pulling punches. Instead, Warner Bros. rushed it into theaters in 1956, forcing LeRoy to defang March's tale with camp eight years before Susan Sontag even got a chance to define the term.

Not that there's anything wrong with camp, but like comedy and horror, camp needs to say its piece, get its big reaction, and exit. The biggest flaw of The Bad Seed is that it runs a good forty minutes too long, so what starts out as good, unclean fun begins to drag. LeRoy's stagey execution doesn't help either. Star Patty McCormack has suggested that this was intentional, and there was a stage version featuring most of the film's cast. But what may work on the stage can make a film feel stilted, and The Bad Seed feels more like a play than a film, right down to the insufferably winking curtain call, complete with spanking. 

Yet The Bad Seed is not a total failure, and this is mostly down to its terrific cast. McCormack's seething, sometimes goggle-eyed Rhoda Penmark is a hoot. Henry Jones is aces as a creepy janitor, who's also pretty good at seething.  Nancy Kelly brings a degree of sincere fret and sweat to Rhoda's mom, and Eileen Heckart as the drunken mom of one of Rhoda's victims nearly stumbles off with the whole movie. Harold Rosson's black and white cinematography is beautiful too.

It's that last factor that makes Warner Bros.'s new remastered blu-ray worth getting for campers with plenty of patience. I have not seen the film's 2011 incarnation on blu-ray, but I have read some damning reviews and seen some screen grabs that support claims it was fuzzy and lacked detail. The newly remastered blu-ray looks terrific, with plenty of detail, even in deep-background elements, as well as superb contrast, clarity, and cleanliness. It was apparently a 4k scan of the original negative, and it looks it.

The two major extras from the 2011 Blu-ray have both been ported over to the 2026 one. These are a commentary between Patty McCormack and super-fan Charles Busch of Psycho Beach Party fame and a fan-pleasing on-screen talk by McCormack in which she lauds the film and her co-stars.

Get it on moviezyng here.