MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Boy’: Vicious Portrait of a Child Psycho

“The Boy Who Cried Bitch” (Laemmle’s Monica) proceeds from a premise that will give mothers in the audience the willies. What would you do if you told your 12-year-old son to put a lid on it and he told you to shove it?

Dan Love (Harley Cross) actually does quite a bit more than this to his mom (Karen Young); as a portrait of the brat as a young psycho, the film gives Dan ample opportunity to throw everything from Kentucky Fried Chicken wings to hatchets and Molotov cocktails at not only his mother but just about everybody else.

We’ve been so inundated with portraits of adult psychos in the movies that it was probably inevitable, in this increasingly teen-pic era, that we’d be treated to the genesis of a child psycho. The TV-movie-style approach of director Juan Jose Campanella and screenwriter Catherine May Levin has the virtue of straightforwardness but the film isn’t quite as clinical and above-board as it pretends to be.

Dan is presented as a tormented case-study, a boy who cannot control his own vicious anxieties. But the compassion is undercut by the “Bad Seed” way in which his rampages are displayed. (The film is Times-rated Mature for violence and language.)

The filmmakers seem to be indicting everyone and everything for Dan’s condition: his mother, an heiress who lacks true compassion; the doctors at the various institutions where Dan is force-fed a regimen of ineffectual therapies; a Vietnam vet who befriends the boy and turns out to be a psycho and a child molester, and so on.

The film tries to argue that Dan’s plight is an inevitable outcome of uncaring juvenile psychiatric facilities, but the indictment seems too harsh. We keep wondering what more we could have done to help him. And since Dan is never that far from seeming like a monster to us, it’s easy to dismiss his psychosis as something untreatable.

The performances don’t help. Young overdoes things; she gives the year’s most fidgety performance. Cross is creepy and effective but he never really strikes a note of compassion. There’s nothing behind his blank, fixated stare.

‘The Boy Who Cried Bitch’

Harley Cross Dan Love

Karen Young Candice Love

Jesse Bradford Nick Love

Adrien Brody Eddie

A Pilgrims 3 production. Director Juan Jose Campanella. Producer Louis Tancredi. Screenplay by Catherine Mary Levin. Cinematographer Daniel Schulman. Editor Darren Kloomok. Costumes Claudia Brown. Music Wendy Blackstone. Production design Nancy Deren. Running time: 1 hour, 41.

Times rated Mature (language and violence.)