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| The poster features Cameron realizing he just committed several felonies |
Watched: 05/25/2025
Format: Amazon
Viewing: First
Director: Mimi Leder
Holy @#$%. This movie is unhinged.
The vibe is sort of Hallmark Hall of Fame, with the rural setting and people all deciding everything is going to be swell for Christmas at the end. It's about Kirk Cameron kidnapping kids and taking them to his pig farm so his adult, developmentally disabled sister will have friends. In order to keep the kids, he tells them that they've died and his house/ farm is heaven - all evidence to the contrary (for example, you have to live with Kirk Cameron). Along the way, they become a sort of family, in a way that feels lifted from The Legend of Billie Jean of all movies.
Look, full disclosure: I can't stand Kirk Cameron. This started all the way back in his Growing Pains days. He's a mediocre actor and seemed like a smug jackass even when he was just taking up real estate in Tiger Beat. But his subsequent weirdo, condescending, "it is I who know the true word of God" routine was thin 30 years ago, and it hasn't improved with the years. He's just the worst.
However, A Little Piece of Heaven (1991) is the first IMDB entry for Lacey Chabert, who would have been only eight years old or so in this movie. And, wouldn't you know it, it's sort of a Christmas movie.
In a way, it's an interesting time capsule of a film. If nothing else, it tells you what seemed perfectly reasonable to TV executives and grown adults working on a movie they were going to broadcast to every TV set in America, should folks choose to tune in. As long as our hero had good intentions, who cares if he's kidnapping children so he can force them to be in his family? Just look at that jack-assed Kirk Cameron smile and try to think he'd ever do wrong.
The kids are Jussie "I didn't think this through" Smollett and Chabert. The sister is actress Jenny Robertson, who is in tons of stuff and, I am delighted to report, the wife of Thomas Lennon (A guy I just like in general). Cloris Leachman is great as the manager of an orphanage Kirk Cameron hailed from and where he stole his first kid from. Ron McLarty, a real "that guy" actor, plays an FBI agent. And Cameron saw to it that his real-life squeeze played his on-screen squeeze.
The movie includes Cameron drugging kids, and luring them out of their homes in the middle of the night. He puts a weapon in the hands of a child and makes him sit and shoot birds. He gaslights and lies, badly, at every opportunity. How he'll keep anyone from noticing he's stolen the only Black kid in a 20 mile radius is never explained, or what he plans to do that isn't completely stupid is never covered. Further, people are going to notice he suddenly has a girl who is the same age, complexion and build as the young girl who went missing. This is a rural community without that many people in it.
There is literally no way this plan makes sense or wouldn't have ended in kids in unmarked graves if the FBI hadn't intervened.
Storylines are started and go nowhere. I still want to know what happened to Smollett's baseball cards. Chabert just goes to live with Cameron at the end? Her family is still alive! There's a whole scene where Kirk Cameron finds out who his birth mom is, learns she's only, like, 14 years older than him and from their local small town, and makes no noise about maybe meeting her and it never comes up again.
It wants to be about found family, but it is, I assure you, not about that at all. It is maybe about really enjoying Stockholm Syndrome.
The ending doesn't make sense. I don't get how the neighbor girl decides to join forces with Cameron and Co. Or in what world a judge would say "you're doing great. A minimum of ten years in jail? No. You now get to do this with approval from the government. We're sending more kids. And keep the two you have, even if one of them has two living parents".
Is it stupid?
Yeah. I mean, it is so stupid it needs to be studied by science. And yet it was up for an Emmy? (Also in need of study.)
The movie is basically an abduction film where we feel sympathy for the monstrous abductor. He's just a guy tryin' his best to get by. It's literally a movie about stealing kids for child labor, both emotional and physical, and brain washing them. He tells them they're dead, for chrissake, and tells them anyone they see might be a "spy" trying to get to those kids in Heaven. Manipulation knows no bounds once you've committed to your inhuman plan, Kirk Cameron.
This version of heaven includes back breaking labor, ghost measles and, as Jussie Smollett points out, no Black people.
And, yeah, there's some weird, awkward race stuff in this movie, not least of which is Smollett being given tough-kid, Chicago Southside dialog written by a person named "Betty Goldberg".
Oh, early 1990's. You so crazy.
Like many folks, this movie can't seem to draw the connection between small children and the adults they will become - so what was Cameron's plan? Because it seems like eventually someone will get sick, or grow up or need to go to school... What Cameron is creating is one of those stories you read about where people kids locked in rooms and they finally escape after two decades. He is effectively ending these kids' lives.
It is so fucked up. I've watched some weird shit this year, but this TV movie may be the oddest of them all.
Chabert is a solid kid actor here. She isn't given much to do, but she looks like a Margaret Keane painting, and sounds pretty natural - not like one of those kids who fall out of the Disney Channel factory. She is supposed to be a victim of abuse, mental and physical, and it is very sad and messed up. And they actually do film a scene with her mother smacking her and yelling right in her little-kid face. Poor lil' Lacey.
Anyway, here she is as a wee moppet.
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