Desejo Macabro

This is a mediocre, made-for-TV diversion, in which Melissa Joan Hart is miscast as an evil, psychopathic teen. She tried, but evil she is not. Her engaging and charismatic personality is much better suited to her ironic role as Sabrina, the teenaged witch, on ABC Friday nights, although at twenty-three she should be getting her PhD instead of playing a high school girl, witch or otherwise. I think the original idea they had for her as a newspaper reporter would have worked. At least she wouldn't have been instantly too old for the role.

Incidentally, I understand she auditioned for the title role in Adrian Lyne's "Lolita," losing out to Dominique Swain. Funny thing about that: Hart really is the Lolita type, so much so that at the age she started playing Clarissa (perhaps 14), she would have been perfect for Nabokov's enchanter. However, by the time Lyne got around to casting for his film, she was way past sweet sixteen, and much more a young woman than a nymphet.

Had they shown her smashing that car window with a baseball bat, I might have believed this movie a little. And they could have made her a tiny bit slutty, which would have been consistent with her character. I had the sense that her mother was watching every detail of the production and didn't want Melissa to look bad, even though the character she was portraying was very bad indeed.

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