Movie Review: Blood and Lace

A couple asleep in bed are murdered with a hammer. Their house is set on fire. A young girl - Ellie Masters) wakes up screaming in a hospital. She's the daughter of the woman murdered. She's being held there until other arrangements can be made because she's still a minor. She escapes one night and is walking along the road when a car starts following her. She tries to run away, but the man catches up to her and turns out to be a detective. He returns her to the hospital. He doesn't leave it there though. He questions the doc about where he'll be sending her and shows contempt when the doc tells him where.

A boy escapes from the home where Ellie will be sent. Tom, who works there, chases after him and ends up cutting his hand off with an ax. The man thinks he's lost the boy, but eventually finds him. Dead.

Ellie is taken to the orphanage and immediately starts flirting with every boy there. Like mother, like daughter, according to the movie. While that's going on, the headmistress Mrs. Deere and Tom show the good doctor around, checking all the bases and somehow managing to convince him that there were no kids missing - cloaking four of the dead children in excuses. It helps that Deere and the good doctor are getting it on.

Ellie goes into the infirmary and decides to introduce herself to all the obviously-dead children. Tom finds her and throws her out just as Deere is showing the good doctor out. After a weird dinner with everyone, the Deere gives Ellie a lecture about young people and why she hates them.

Snooping, Ellie finds a girl named Jennifer tied to the support beam in the attic. She keeps saying how thirsty she is and tells her that she'd tried to run away. Tom finds Ellie trying to get water for Jennifer and threatens to make her keep Jennifer company.

Detective guy comes by and asks to search the house for a boy who'd run away. He also asks to talk to Ellie. Ellie voices her disdain for the place, but he doesn't take her seriously. She goes for a walk with some boy named Walter - who looks like he's 34 - and they have a disagreement about her ability to run away.

Tom tricks Ellie down to the basement with hopes of escaping, but then tries to have sex with her. Deere sends Ellie to her room and fires Tom, but he knows too much so he makes himself her partner. In the shed, Deere tells Ellie about her dead husband - the reason she hates the youths - and how she's keeping him preserved so he can be brought back when the science has advanced.

Ellie tells a younger girl that Walter will never be interested in her and the girl attacks her. Tom breaks it up. The next day Ellie walks in on Walter and the younger girl about to do the dirty. After a series of weird visions/dreams/half-awake sightings of a man with a hammer, Ellie decides to run away. She even tells Deere, who immediately tells Tom to get rid of her. She grabs her suitcase and opens it, finding a severed hand inside. She runs away to the attic - why the attic, I don't know. She finds the man with the hammer there and runs out only to be caught by Tom, who throws her in the freezer in the basement. Another boy sees him do this.

Someone has alerted the authorities that many children have disappeared from the home. The good doctor shows up because his reputation is on the line and demands to speak to each and every kid. The boy who saw Tom tells the young girl, who denies hearing Ellie's screams from inside. The good doctor wants to see inside the freezer so Deere decides that that's exactly where he'll go. After getting a meat cleaver in his back.

The man with the hammer appears and challenges Tom. As they tussle, Deere grabs a crowbar and goes after Ellie. The hammer guy stops her and allows Ellie to escape. Hammer guy defeats Tom and runs after Ellie as Deere drags Tom into the freezer. Deere screams and the camera pans to Jennifer as she closes the freezer door on both of them. Hammer guy, who looks like his face was made of plaster, catches up to Ellie. He reveals himself to the detective. Ellie had killed her mother and tried to kill the man she'd been with.

Um.... detective wants to marry Ellie. Um... ew. He can do so much better. He tells her that he was the first one to make love to her mother, which is weird because earlier in the movie Ellie had said that the first man to make love to her mother had gotten her pregnant. Oh, wait... nope, that's weird. He's her dad. All the weirdness and no resolution. All the creepies.

Moral of this movie: Well... don't murder your mother because you may end up married to your father.

"I was an orphan the day I was born - or maybe you didn't know my mother."