Spoonful of Sugar

One of Shudder's low-budget horror stories. It is a slow-burning film. It takes its time to develop the characters. It's not a horror-action movie.

At the forefront of the story is a young couple who's struggling to take care of their only young son who is severely autistic. Johnny (Danillo Crovetti) throws violent tantrums and is sometimes hard to contain. Dealing with Johnny's issues puts a great strain on the couple's relationship and they look numb on the outside as well as inside.

After losing the last nanny, they hire Millicent (Morgan Taylor) without doing a background check. Millicent is a cookie herself with a whole sort of psychological issues. She perfectly plays the role of someone who has been abused and has been in and out of foster homes throughout her life.

When Millicent meets Johnny, an immediate rapport is established between them. Millicent first time feels a sense of family, and, Johnny first time feels safe. Soon after, Millicent quits her prescription LSD drops for feeling much better and gets the bright idea of using her LSD drops on Johnny's foods and medicine. What could go wrong?

It is not an exciting movie but it is a good story, good direction, and good acting. The script is good. If you don't like slow-cooking stories, it might not be your cup of tea.

Spoonful of Sugar (2022) is a film that was recently added to Shudder. The storyline follows a young lady who takes medication to manage a condition that causes her to see things and lose her mind. Her parents abandoned her and she has been in and out of foster homes and currently lives with a creep who can't wait until she turns 18. Meanwhile, she studies at a college and is writing a thesis on allergies and that they are as much in your mind as reality. To make ends meet she picks up a job babysitting an eccentric young man who has extreme allergies, doesn't talk and is abusive towards his parents. As she babysits the young man he makes tremendous progress, the mom gets jealous and the young lady starts falling in love with the dad. This causes a tidal wave of events at the house that is bound to cause an explosive conclusion.

This movie is directed by Mercedes Bryce Morgan (Fixation) and stars Morgan Saylor (White Girl), Kat Foster (Jean-Claude Van Johnson), Myko Olivier (Glee), Danilo Crovetti (Hunters) and Laura Coover (Agent Carter).

This movie is fantastic. The storyline is very clever with entertaining twists and turns. The main character is perfectly delivered, awkward, unpredictable and fascinating all at the same time. Her hallucinations are very well presented. The cinematography in this movie is very good and helped create intensity that is felt throughout the movie. The adopted dad is crazy creepy and made me feel icky every scene he is in. Honestly, the acting and dialogue of every character feels authentic and this had a 'May' feel to it in a lot of ways. There's a rabbit 🐇 scene that's wild and very well done. The storyline for this keeps you glued to the screen until the very end; and when the conclusion arrives, you're hit by a truck...then backed over. I adored how this film concludes.

Overall, this is a magnificent addition to the horror genre that's absolutely worth your time. I would score this an 8-8.5/10 and strongly recommend it.

There's a definite lack of thematic consistency. The film isn't sure what it wants to be - Is it a take on acid trips and its effects? Is it about bad parenting? Is it about cheating in relationships? Is it about childhood trauma? The writing tries to dip its paintbrush in all of these buckets, but it doesn't come together in a very satisfying way. But, to the film's credit, the performances (especially Morgan Saylor, who effortlessly swings between sweet, menacing, and sexy) largely cover up for the holes in the plot. The visual effects looked pretty bad in the first act, though when the LSD elements kicked in, I felt the director executed the hallucinatory bits nicely. At least a couple of scenes made me aghast, and that includes a wild raw-dogging bit as well as the gory climax. A twist is revealed almost right before the end credits, and though it made sense from a storytelling standpoint, the ramifications seemed low.

This is impressive.

It's The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, but way more weird and creepy.

I wasn't ready for this. This is going to sit with me for a while.

The Chapstick at the end was an interesting detail.

I watched this on AMC+/Shudder. It has a listed release date of March 2, 2023, but it dropped early. On the 21st or before. Probably after the Winter Film Awards International Film Festival in New York on Sunday the 19th.

I have dug Kat Foster in a bunch of TV shows, 'Til Death (2006-2008), Your Family Or Mine (2015) and more.

This is one of at least 9 Mommy Horror movie's we're getting this year. Also Baby Ruby, Birth/Rebirth, Blood, House/Wife, Huesera: The Bone Woman, M3GAN, There's Something Wrong With the Children and They Wait in the Dark. There's probably more I've forgotten. I think the moral of the stories is, don't have kids.

This film is exhausting. The plot is scant at best. The idea, I think, might be interesting but the execution, writing, dialogue really don't help to understand it. I appreciate the idea I really do.

The end result though is a bunch of really disturbed characters and there's no one root for, not even the little kid. They're trying to make a disturbing horror film which it's not. It's not horror at all, maybe towards the end. But it's more just a muddled dream sequence/perverted LSD trip.

I couldn't summarize this move because by the end I didn't care what happened. There are some cool shots, cinematography, and some somewhat disturbing scenes. So maybe it's worth a watch for that. But besides that I just left feeling empty and sad. The end.