TV REVIEWS : Adoption Nightmare in ‘Child of Rage’ on CBS

Child psychologists will have a field day and would-be adoptive parents will be rendered numb by the horrific, fact-based drama about an adopted little girl who joins her new family with enough anger to want to kill in “Child of Rage” (at 9 tonight on CBS, Channels 2 and 8).

A loving couple (convincingly played by Dwight Schultz and Mel Harris) adopt a sweet-looking child (remarkably played by Ashley Peldon) and her adorable but strangely silent younger brother (Samuel Grifaldi).

The girl can’t get through the night without waking up to visions of a drunken father physically abusing her. Loveless and unattached, swept in and out of foster homes, she’s become a sociopath at 7. Now in her bright new trial home, with an endearing new father who’s a minister and a mother who treats her as if she were Goldilocks, the girl unleashes her violence under a cloak of charm and fake remorse that makes the little girl in that old movie “The Bad Seed” look like a character out of “Heidi.”

She kills birds, sticks a sharp needle in the family collie (in a scene guaranteed to lose viewers, however dramatically justified it is) and comes close to killing her little brother by battering his head against the basement floor.

Remarkably, the adoptive parents, battered but not defeated, finally find help with a child psychologist (well played by Mariette Hartley) whose bonding and “holding” therapy (in practice, a very get-tough ordeal) begins to compel the child to recognize her violent past, direct her anger at her real father and, thus, control it.

Well, nearly. There is that later incident with the kitchen knife while her parents are asleep.

This is a movie with no room for levity. The point is that the story is true and, as such, wisely holding nothing back, writer Phil Penningroth and director Larry Peerce, with a harrowing contribution from young Peldon, bring us closer to understanding the pain passed on from generation to generation.