Un amour assassin

In JULIE DARLING, Harold and his wife, Irene (Anthony Franciosa and Cindy Girling), are in conflict over their daughter, Julie (Isabelle Mejias). Harold spoils her, while Irene seems to be the only one that's aware of the girl's bad behavior. For her part, Julie prefers her pet Boa constrictor over human company. Her interests include hunting and surgery.

When it's decided to send Julie away to boarding school, mum uses the opportunity to get rid of the snake. She soon dies tragically. Julie and dad mourn for about three seconds.

Enter Susan (Sybil Danning), dad's new wife. Julie hates her and the fact that she has a young son. We know this because she eyes the boy like an owl looks at a field mouse! Harold is, as always, limply oblivious.

When Julie spies on Harold and Susan in bed, things really get weird! Let's just say that Julie's a little too fond of dad!

This is a decent, though rather tiresome thriller, saving most of its twisted action for the gonzo finale (aka: the last 14 minutes). However, it's worth the wait!...

I've been searching and waiting to see "Julie Darling" for quite a very long time, and now that I finally watched, I'm both pleased and upset. Pleased because it's one of the most intense and disturbing 80's thrillers I've seen in a very long time, and upset because it undeservedly became obscure and forgotten amidst the overflow of inferior slasher pictures in that same decade. "Julie Darling" can more or less be categorized as a so-called Bad Seed effort, or – in other words – (horror) movies dealing with evil, psychopathic and murderous children. But this awesome little gem qualifies as a lot more than just that as well. It's a psychological "family" drama with a thoroughly uncanny atmosphere, numerous controversial undertones and a handful of very efficient shock moments. Julie Wilding is a cherubic and well- educated adolescent girl with a rather unhealthy affection for her daddy. Her mother notices Julie's rivalry and possessive behavior and wants to send her to a boarding school. But then her mother gets raped and killed by the grocery delivery boy, and even though Julie witnesses the whole thing from atop of the stairs, she doesn't move a muscle. Just when Julie thinks to have her daddy all for herself, he reveals that he's been having a secret affair for many years and wants to raise a new family with the lovely Susan and her little son. Rather than to get her own hands dirty, Julie tracks down her mother's murderer and blackmails him into doing the same with her new step family. She even joyously adds the words "Oh, and you can rape her all you want…". If Sigmund Freud would have ever written a movie script, the result would look a lot like "Julie Darling". The film is literally stuffed with psychosexual references and disputatious elements, like incestuous, intercourse with minors and matricide. In spite of its obscure status, "Julie Darling" features quite a few famous (in the cult/horror business, at least) names. Writer/director Paul Nicolas was also responsible for the greatest Women in Prison exploitation flick ever made, namely "Chained Heat" released that same wondrous year 1983. Anthony Franciosa, known from Dario Argento's giallo classic "Tenebre" is excellent as the unsuspecting (?) father and many horror fanatics will be super enthusiast to see Sybil Danning stars as the lovely stepmom. The one true diva of the film, however, is young Isabelle Mejias as Julie. I always thought that Patty McCormack ("The Bad Seed" 1956) was the most devilish child star, but she's a church choir girl in comparison to Isabelle Mejias. She depicts a truly frightening, cold-hearted and malignant teenage psycho.

There have been plenty of movies about evil children over the years, but Julie Darling distinguishes itself by being more perverse than most.

Isabelle Mejias plays cherubic teen Julie, who only has eyes for daddy (Anthony Franciosa), but isn't as innocent as she pretends to be. Her wicked streak is evident in the relish she takes in feeding live rats to her pet snake, her joy at shooting birds while hunting with her father, and the cruel pranks she plays on her long suffering mother Irene (Cindy Girling). Julie takes her callousness to a whole new level when delivery man Weston (Paul Hubbard) tries to rape her mother: even though she trains the sights of her gun on the man, Julie doesn't pull the trigger, her deliberate inaction resulting in the death of her mum, who hits her head on the stone floor during the struggle.

With her mum gone, Julie has dear daddy all to herself, or so she thinks: the girl is shocked to learn that her father has a mistress, Susan (sexy cult star Sybil Danning), and now, with his wife dead, he is free to marry her. Worse still, Susan has an irritating young son who is stealing daddy's attention. After Julie wakes to hear a noisy sex session between her pops and his sexy new spouse (during which it becomes very clear that the girl harbours incestuous desires for her father), she hatches a plot to get rid of her new stepmother.

Mejias (actually 21 at time of filming, but looking younger) puts in a commanding performance as the conniving minx, utterly convincing as a cold-hearted psychopath. Franciosa is less credible, especially when doting on stepson Dennis (Benjamin Schmoll), and Danning does what she does best: look sexy and remove her clothes (other gratuitous nudity comes courtesy of Girling, who takes a bubble bath, and Mejias, who is topless during her jaw-droppingly twisted Oedipal fantasy sex scene with Franciosa).

Director Paul Nicholas does a great job in keeping the suspense levels high, constantly surprising the viewer with Julie's lack of empathy: not only does the evil brat blackmail Weston into killing Susan ("And you can rape her all you want before you kill her"), but she also orchestrates the murder of her best friend Michelle. The brutal, bloody climax sees Susan beaten and thrown through a window, Weston stabbed in the crotch with a broken bottle (nasty!) before being blasted by Julie with a shotgun, and Susan proving that she wasn't lying when she said she would do anything to protect those she loves.

This movie is marketed as a Sybil Danning vehicle even though the erstwhile German-American sex symbol is really only in the last half of the movie, and the really memorable performance is by the unknown Isabella Mejia as a disturbed teenage girl whose infatuation with her father (Antonio Franciosa from "Tenebra")leads her to allow an intruder to rape and murder her own mother. She then blackmails the same guy into trying to do the same to her new stepmother (Sybil Danning). The disturbed girl at one point even locks her young step-brother in an old fridge in the middle of a junkyard.

I saw this film almost back-to-back with another, much more terrible Sybil Danning-starrer "They're Playing with Fire". But while that film was a horrid hybrid of a dumb 80's teen sex comedy and an idiotic 90's erotic thriller (featuring Sybil in the sack with the annoying kid from "Private Lessons", and the once great Andrew Prine flushing his career right down the toilet), this film does the burgeoning erotic thriller genre proud (or as proud as you can do that crappy genre). It has a real, if not necessarily highly believable, plot and pretty decent acting. Other reviewers have compared it to "The Bad Seed", but it is actually better than that stagey, melodramatic flick (which ends with the villain literally being struck down by lightning). I'd put it somewhere between that one and a truly deserving classic like "Pretty Poison" (with Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins).

This movie is certainly no classic, but it doesn't really deserve its current obscure status either. It's probably Danning's best (American)movie. Those who watch it just to see her take her clothes off for the zillionth time won't be disappointed of course, but I think they'll also be pleasantly surprised with the rest of the movie.

Isabelle Mejias, an under-recognized talent who deserved better material than she received during her brief acting tenure, performs strongly as Julie, a socially disunited young lady with a ravenous Electra complex. Julie harbors malicious and dangerous resentments toward anyone she feels is competing for her father's affections, or who might create a rift within her delusional fantasy world. Hapless potential-victims-to-be are her new step-brother and step-mom(Sybil Danning, upstaged once again by her extremely well-ventilated 36-C juggage). It's a minor B gem with a brisk pace, mounting suspense, and some pretty grim deaths...JULIE, DARLING was not a boxoffice success, and received a rather limited VHS release. This is a better quality picture than its relative obscurity might suggest, and ripe on the vine for rediscovery. 6/10