Back when Drew Barrymore was trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life, she made this movie about being a bad girl - only she wasn't that bad. She did it mostly with mental games, and though there is a certain sexual overtone to the movie, there's actually very little sex in it. Perhaps that means she was over her bad girl phase, since she hit at such a young age.
Or perhaps she was just in need of a paycheck, so she took the opportunity to jump at whatever came along. After all, this was probably the best of all the Poison Ivy movies that were made, so it's certainly good that she picked the first, rather than one of the others, but you can't really give her credit for thinking ahead, when there was no guarantee that they would have ever made another one, so who knows?
In any case, Ivy is the name given to Barrymore's character, though it's not necessarily her actual name. She just decides to use it one day because she happens to be wearing a temporary tattoo on her leg that has some ivy on it, and she sticks with the name because she likes the sound. We never really hear if that's her real name or not.
From there, she moves in on an innocent enough family, and she starts taking things over. First her friendship morphs into something more like a sisterhood, then she makes some moves on the dad, which is just bizarre, and then she tries to become the mother, wearing her clothes and living in her room. It's just a little strange.
Though the movie moves pretty slowly through a lot of it, towards the end it picks up steam as she becomes the lover of the father, actually kills the mother and nearly kills the daughter. In the end, of course, she ends up dead herself and her friend and the father are safe without Ivy's influence. But along the way it's a fairly disturbing look at just how far one can insinuate themselves into your life if you let them.
Rated R for language, sexuality and violence.
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