Treasure Trove of Trash

I’ve written before about my favorite home entertainment device and the wonderfully weird channels found on it, but I’ve recently uncovered a Treasure Trove of Trash that I did not know existed, and it was right under my nose!

Amazon’s Prime is probably best known for it’s rapid shipping service 0f a lot of the online retailer’s inventory and secondarily for it’s instant video service offering movies and television shows streamed to computers and internet enabled devices such as the Roku. Just as Amazon is becoming the nation’s leading retailer, they would like to steal some of Netflix’s thunder by deepening their video offerings. They offer major Hollywood releases and produce original TV series, but in order to make it appear that their pool of entertainment is deep, it seems that they have scrabbled for whatever they could find. It seems that no matter what it is, if it has been digitized, Amazon is running it. Some of the video transfers are surprisingly shaky looking as if the source material came from well-used VHS cassettes. It seems that there is a lot of crap padding out their library.

Tina and I have a terrible taste for trash. Bad made-for-TV movies are a particular favorite, and with Prime, it seems we have struck the mother lode! As I’ve sought out stuff that we could watch while doing something else, I would use Amazon’s terrible search engine and found some tacky television programs. The result was that Amazon started recommending more of the same which leads us to today’s offering:

The missus and I recently viewed the 1992 sub-classic Midnight’s Child starring Cotter Smith and Marcy Walker.

Trouble starts when RISD grad and illustrator Dad and power, something to do with business, real breadwinner Mom decide to hire an au pair and find to their horror that you just can’t get good help these days. Olivia d’Abo plays the scheming babysitter whose dramatic arc seems to be following the oft imitated trajectories of the villains from Fatal Attraction and Single White Female. The Au Pair starts to run things. Dad is giving the help the eye and laughing too much at her jokes. The kid seems to like the help more than Mom. Mom goes from edgy to paranoid, and she starts to lose it.

Then it takes an odd turn into the supernatural and weirdly veers off into Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen land. It’s like they tried to cram two movies into 90 minutes. I won’t spoil all of the plot points although you could probably figure them out on your own.

It also turns out that the devil woman has some artistic chops and besides from doing some interesting children’s book stuff she also works on H.R. Giger knockoffs in secret.…and who is the child that is the charge of the satanic nanny?
It’s Mad Men’s own Peggy Olson!