Day: September 14, 2025

I watched the Svengoolie show movie, “The Baddest Seed on the Planet” yesterday on the Internet Archive because I wanted to see the Iowa Hawkeye vs UMass football game last night. Hey, the Iowa Hawkeyes and the Iowa State Cyclones both won yesterday!

Actually, I thought “The Bad Seed” was a pretty good movie, just to let the shrilling chicken out of the bag. It’s a good break from the rubber mask, stop motion animation, shlocky howlers. It does run long, a little over 2 hours and at times there’s a little too much lofty psychoanalytic dialogue. At times it seemed like a play.

It’s a 1956 Warner Bros. Pictures production. There was a Perry Mason regular on it; William Hopper played Col. Kenneth Penmark (father of Rhoda). Henry Jones played Leroy, the really creepy sociopath handyman who had a lot in common with Rhoda (played by Patty McCormack), the psychopathic 8-year-old daughter of Kenneth and Christine Penmark (played by Nancy Penmark). Eileen Heckart played the heck out of her role as the tipsy Hortense Daigle, mother of her unfortunate murdered child Claude—who is never seen.

The main underlying theme is the question of whether psychopaths are born bad or victims of bad environments.

How this gets treated in the film is fascinating. When Rhoda saws through a fawn with a dull straight razor while singing Elvis Presley’s “Don’t Be Cruel,” it really doesn’t leave much to the imagination.

Things start to go bad early when Claude wins a penmanship award instead of Rhoda who is thinking, “OK bud, over your dead body!” I’ve got to tell you; I got chills just looking at her after a while.

The handyman Leroy pegs Rhoda for a bad seed right away, mainly based on the idea that bad seeds think alike. He keeps telling her he’s got her number until he has a close encounter of the excelsior kind, and “excelsior” means ever upward only in the sense that burning wood shavings used for packing fragile items tend to be carried by the wind.

Just to gloss over the scientific psychiatric literature on psychopathy, the most recent paper I could find on the web suggests that structural and functional brain abnormalities of psychopathic persons contribute substantially to the observed behavioral patterns of callousness and poor adaptability to prosocial motivations beginning early in life and which tend to be resistant to change as one gets older. The younger the person, the more plastic the antisocial traits may be to change via behavioral modification, hopefully leading to greater empathy. (Anderson NE, Kiehl KA. Psychopathy: developmental perspectives and their implications for treatment. Restor Neurol Neurosci. 2014;32(1):103-17. doi: 10.3233/RNN-139001. PMID: 23542910; PMCID: PMC4321752.)

By far, Hortense Daigle has the most awkwardly comical role as she combines grief, inebriation and eerie suspicion of Rhoda in her own son’s death. Every time she shows up to the Penmark house, she’s roaring, dramatically staggering drunk. She helps herself to the booze in the house, even making it clear which bourbon she prefers (Never mind my grief! I said I wanted that martini in a dirty glass!).

Other than the movie being a bit too long, I thought it was very good. I could have done without the theater like credits with all the actors coming out to take a bow (or curtsy in Rhoda’s case), a slapstick bit between Christine and Rhoda, and the warning to the audience not to reveal the ending to anyone.