The Baby Snatcher

Let’s start with red flags. Number one would be multiple working and official titles, including the discrepancy between the title on the sequence and the title under which the movie is shown. Number two is the same last name across the credits, suggesting that it is pretty much a family affair. Given that the surname is Lawrence and not, for instance, Coppola, we should lower our expectations. The third and the fourth one could trigger the more seasoned, more highbrow and more, if you want, snobbish among us. Just a basic look at the film’s IMDB page reveals that Baby Dust, Baby Snatcher, My Best Friend the Baby Snatcher or Maternal Sin (whichever you prefer) is a TV movie from last year, so it is certainly not going to tour A list festivals and be the hidden gem we found for you guys. Lastly, the sheer number of screenwriters (we have four of them here, two come from the same family and two are also the cast members) in such a low budget movie is usually inversely proportional to the coherence of the vision regarding both the story and the storytelling.

The core of the story is fairly simple: two besties become pregnant at the same time, one of them miscarries and comes up with the plan to, well, try to snatch the other one’s baby, eliminating the witnesses (such as their respective husbands and some other characters only loosely connected to their story) in process of doing so. It should suffice for a schlocky horror-thriller, but let’s not forget we are in a TV movie, so it actually plays out as a moralising drama based on clichés: the 'good' couple, Penelope (Adrienne Thomas) and Richie (Matthew Lawrence), are straight-as-an-arrow people and they are less affluent than the obvious baddie Eve (Jen Taylor) and her well-meaning but not too bright husband Tom (Paul London).

The first of the troubles comes from storytelling and the screenwriters’ desire to develop the basic story into something bigger. Therefore, they introduce flashbacks, including the one at the very beginning to establish Eve as a psychopath and one more that takes up almost the entire first act in which we get the needless explanation of how the two friends got pregnant at the same time, but not why so. After the plot starts developing in a straight line for the second and the third act, it becomes more and more of a demonstration that Eve is completely bonkers while the others slowly figure out what the viewers could sense from the very beginning.

The characters are underwritten, so the acting would become a hard task even for stronger actors with some sense for improvisation. However, we don’t have that kind of thespian here: the biggest stars are Jen Taylor (of one season of Two And A Half Men fame) and the director’s brother Matthew Lawrence who blossomed as a child actor in Mrs Doubtfire, did several series such as Brotherly Love and Boy Meets World and appeared in the semi-moronic comedy The Hot Chick (notice that all of those are from between 20 and 30 years ago). For the cherry on the top, we also get to see the former WWE 'star' Paul London getting smashed, which is by far the most interesting, if not at all decent, phony acting moment of the film.

On the semi-positive side, the director Andrew Lawrence has learned where to put and where to point the camera in order to execute the dialogue scenes as a series of not spectacular, but also not spectacularly bad reverse shots, and the film’s technical merits are sufficient for the small screen. Surely, the director shouldn’t be bothered with such tiny 'details' as lighting, which is sometimes done in a mind-boggling manner, while the cheap visual effects of obviously fake fire in two scenes (one of them being the opening one, and the other coming just before the end to point out the 'full circle' symbolic) round the impression that whatever-the-title-the-film-goes-by-now is trash.