In the thriller The Baby Snatcher – aka My Best Friend the Baby Snatcher, which appears on the poster and gives away the whole plot, aka Maternal Sin, the title found on the opening and closing credits of the copy I watched, aka Baby Dust, the oddly cloying title IMDb lists it under – we get a pretty standard tale of a pregnant woman imperilled and another woman driven to madness by her irrational envy of women able to fulfil what is apparently their biological destiny when she cannot.
If this all sounds terribly familiar, the chances are that you’ve previously in your life seen a Lifetime movie; these stories of murder, child endagerment, attempted or successful kidnappings, and usurping female friends are cranked out on a weekly basis and, despite the almost invariably misogynist undertones, are made largely for, and sometimes by, bored middle-aged females. Not being a housewife and, in fact, not having a TV licence – I prefer to rely on streaming or home video for personal entertainment purposes – I rarely have occasion to, myself, but as it happens, visiting family last weekend I killed two hours with a Lifetime movie near-identical to this one, lending an eerie sense of déjà vu to the experience that wasn’t altogether unpleasant. Actually, there was more enjoyment in the sensation than the film itself.
I could assess the performances, the screenplay, the cinematography, and so on at this point, but it isn’t really worth it. These films aren’t made to receive critical attention, they’re made to fill up schedules and be more diverting than total boredom. They’re something of a relic in an age of streaming and one wonders how their limited viewership can continue to justify even the relatively low expense of their production, though in this case that cost may have been offset by the family-affair nature of things; at least, in the credits we encounter an Andrew Lawrence (director; co-writer; composer; musical performer), a Donna Lawrence (co-writer; actress); and a Matthew Lawrence (actor). This takes on particular significance in light of the film’s ending scroll only crediting a total of 29 individuals, including the entire cast – including Mr. Smee as “Car Buyer’s Dog”. You may, of course, make of that what you will.