the leading man is my tpye

The Worst Film Ever

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

One of those movies that is neither good or bad but just below average. Adopting Terror does have some things going for it, the best aspect being the menacing performance of Brendan Fehr, an achievement for someone who doesn't have a huge amount to work with. The first 15 minutes or so are unsettling too, the baby is adorable and the locations show effort and a sense of atmosphere. The production values and supporting cast generally are very competent but they are never more than that, they're never cheap or bad but just without distinction throughout. Unfortunately the leads don't carry Adopting Terror well at all. Sean Astin has a flat character to begin with and he brings very little emotion in terms of acting which only accentuates that fact, instead it is a very stiff and lifeless performance. Samaire Armstrong's acting is a mix of overwrought overacting and disinterested mumbling, one of those vulnerable-meaning performances that doesn't strike the right chord in the least bit. The chemistry between Astin and Armstrong never convinces either. The music is far too heavy-sounding and too much of a dirge in terms of tempo, it does tone down a little later on but it's never memorable and it happens too late really. The script is also uncomfortably clunky and ham-fisted, delivered also with very little urgency and it never does find the right tone. The story is the chief factor in where Adopting Terror falls down, the ending is one that doesn't surprise in the least bit, the movie is often very dully paced especially in the middle and this is one thriller with very little if any suspense or thrills and instead reeks of predictability. If there were any scares intended at all they were very tame, and the more melodramatic elements didn't seem to be taken that seriously, it's all underwritten and overacted that any melodrama comes across as more cheesy than poignant. The characters are not developed and not easy to invest in, Fehr's character was the most rootable and that wasn't even the intention, that actually shows how flatly realised Astin and Armstrong's characters are. Overall, Adopting Terror starts well and has good locations, an adorable baby and one very good performance but the lead performances, music, script and story are really lacking. And the production values and supporting cast fall into the camp of never being amateurish but never standout-worthy either. 4/10 Bethany Cox

I didn't catch this movie right at the beginning, so I can't comment on that, but after ten minutes of creepiness (the birthday party scene) I decided to give it a chance. As time went on I found myself shouting at the TV and growing angry at the characters and the decisions they were making. Lets go through a few situations that had me angry/annoyed.The 1st one is the fact that they were so UNPREPARED for that baby, like seriously, who doesn't have a baby thermometer in their house when they have a new baby (or any children period). The adoptive "mother" kept asking people if her daughter felt warm, it's like "Hey stupid, go get a thermometer". THEN, they decide to go out for the night (Sorry, but I can't bring myself to CARE enough to remember where they were going), this while they KNOW the biological father is stalking them AND COULD potentially try to steal back the baby, UGH. To make matters worse, the adoptive mother's father (who was helping his wife babysit) LETS A COMPLETE STRANGER INTO THE HOUSE. This made no sense since the father was looking at the guy like he was some kind of criminal. It's like, "You look like a deviant, but come on in....there is no way you're the creepy stalker my daughter told us about." So yeah, some stranger coming by to ask for a ladder late at night isn't a little bit suspect. I'm sorry but, give your head a shake.Next there is the way the cops and social worker handle the "stalker father" situation. There is NO WAY in hell anyone would ever be that uncaring about a situation like that. And secondly, there is no way I would put up with that kind of treatment when my child's safety is at stake...these scenes had me wanting to reach through the TV screen and slap the police and social worker. Terrible, just terrible. Oh and another thing, The TWIST....um who didn't see that one coming from a mile away LMAO. Wow, I just realized there is just too many horrible scenes (including the hospital one)to list all the ones that made me mad, but I will say that The chemistry between any of these characters was EXTREMELY lacking.I like Sean Astin, but as a lead actor...um not so much, sorry not a good casting decision. The adoptive mother (Samaire Armstrong)was probably the worst casting decision overall, as she over-acted most of her scenes. Brendan Fehr was the only good thing about this movie. While, he didn't have much to work with...he still looked hot as the dark, emotionless psychopath who only wanted his daughter back.I guess I'll leave it at that. In summary, if you are looking for a movie that is bad, but not awful enough to ruin your day...check this movie out — otherwise just SKIP IT.

Adopting Terror, deserves so much more credit than it deserves, under one million dollars, I was expecting a terrible film, but instead I got a decent film with great use of locations in it. The plot is about a married couple adopt a baby (that was taken from her biological father) but suffer the consequences of the father being around for too long. It's a predictable film, because it's been done a million times, but their was a great effort put into the production. If you're a fan of B movies, I suggest this may be the one for you. I overall give it a 7/10, The Asylum have been surprising me a lot lately, it does show they truly do have some talent after-all. -Trent Browning

"Adopting Terror" is an intense and rather confusing melodrama which has two pages listed on IMDb.com, one a pre-production page that does not identify it as a TV-movie — were they hoping for a theatrical release and sold it to Lifetime when they didn't get one? — and one a post-release page but one which doesn't identify many of the actors, including star Sean Astin, John Astin's son. The plot: Tim Broadbent (Sean Astin, a stocky guy of medium height who doesn't really look that much like his dad, John Astin of "The Addams Family") and his wife Cheryl (who appears to have been played by Kristen Quintrall — the IMDb.com pages list her character as "Nikki" and this suggests a last-minute script revision by writers Micho Rutare, who also directed, and Nik Frank-Lehrer) adopt a few-months-old baby who's been in state custody. They do this through something called the Community First Adoption Agency, headed by Dr. Ziegler (Michael Gross), and the social worker assigned to the case to supervise the adoption and recommend whether it should be made permanent at the final hearing is a willowy young (younger than Cheryl!) white woman named Fay Hopkins (Monet Mazur).What the Broadbents don't know but we do — at least we do if we watched this movie from the beginning (a couple of people who posted to IMDb.com about it didn't and therefore were confused) — is that the baby, Mona, was taken away from her parents in the first place and made a war of the state because she was living with her dad, Kevin Anderson (the tall, dark and sexy Brendan Fehr) when Child Protective Services got a call that she was being neglected, and when their worker (an African-American, like so many voice-of-reason authority figures in Lifetime movies) came over, Kevin shot her — presumably non-fatally, since he was convicted only of simple assault and was paroled in less than a year — then was ambushed by police outside the apartment building where he was living and arrested, while the baby was taken by the state and put in foster care until the Broadbents saw her picture online and initiated adoption proceedings.The Broadbents are having Mona's one-year birthday party in a local park (there's a mention that this story takes place in San Diego but no recognizable San Diego locations appear) when Kevin crashes the party and takes out his own camera (a disposable film camera rather than the digital ones the Broadbents and Cheryl's parents are using, which clearly symbolizes the class differences between them) and takes Mona's picture. From then on Kevin stalks the Broadbents, and when Tim tries to turn the tables and stalk Kevin at his house (where he noticed 8" x 10" blow-ups of his photos of Mona on the wall), Kevin turns that around and gets a restraining order against him. The Broadbents go to Dr. Ziegler and ask for information on contacting Mona's birth mother, and are told there's nothing he can do because it was a closed adoption and mom's privacy needs to be protected — whereupon a furious Tim asks Ziegler how Kevin Anderson got their address if the information was supposed to be so confidential. Kevin shows up outside the home of a couple who are friends of the Broadbents, whose son bites Mona on the forehead during a play session — and a smarmily apologetic Fay tells the Broadbents on her next visit that she's going to have to photograph that and put it in their file.Fay's rather smarmy manner — plus the fact that she's white on a network where virtually all the legitimate members of the helping professions are Black — makes us suspicious of her from the get-go, but about two-thirds of the way through the film the big reversal comes: Fay, who claimed to have masters' degrees in both social work and clinical psychology, is really an impostor; she's Mona's biological mother and she and Kevin are involved in a plot to derail the Broadbents' chances at legally adopting Mona so they can take her back for themselves. Kevin breaks into Dr. Ziegler's office by disguising himself as a janitor and kills him just when he's about to stumble on the real identity of Mona's birth mother (he's Web-surfing on his laptop for the information when he's croaked), and before that Kevin showed up at the hospital where the Broadbents were supposed to get Mona her childhood immunizations, kidnapped Mona but then gave her back when he was caught (once again he was in disguise, this time wearing the green scrubs the hospital itself issued to its own staff).Though "Adopting Terror" is a bit melodramatic in the usual Lifetime manner, and it suffers from their decision to cut back on the soft-core porn that used to be the highlight of many a Lifetime movie (we only get a brief, furtive, shadowy glimpse of Kevin and Fay doing it, and they're fully clothed), it's also a quite competent if unoriginal thriller that gets better as it goes along, the exposition gets out of the way and Rutare's direction gets tighter and more effective.