Hitler's Daughter (1990)
A review by Scott Hamilton and Chris Holland.
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Our rating: one lava lamp (out of five).
Hitler's Daughter is a surprisingly violent TV movie that aired in 1990. We saw this in the local TV listing recently and just had to see it. What you need to understand is that six months ago we happened to buy a bad little pot-boiler by the same name at a used book sale. The cover declares "Hitler's Daughter... Wants to occupy the White House." How could we resist? And lo and behold, the movie, which was on at 2 in the morning, sandwiched between an endless variety of sex talk line commercials, is in fact based on the book! We were in cannabalistic pop culture heaven!
We are introduced to the main character, Ted Scott (Patrick Cassidy), and he spends the rest of the movie wondering why he doesn't have a last name. Just kidding. Ted is a White House press aide working for a lame duck president during election season. The incumbent Vice President, Elliot Benedict, is running for his boss' job. Virgil Rutledge is running for the other party.
One day, Ted gets a call from an old professor of his named Bauman (Donald Davis). The professor wants to meet with Ted because he has some very important information to give him, but Ted blows him off. This is why Ted is surprised when the Bauman somehow gets into the secured parking garage at Ted's place of business just as Ted is leaving work. Bauman has a package he wants to give Ted, but before he can, both Ted and Bauman are attacked by men posing as security guards. Bauman is killed, Ted is knocked out, and one of the guards shoots himself in the shoulder so Ted will be framed as a killer. Then, taking a cue from every James Bond villain ever, they leave Ted in a car rigged to explode along with Bauman's bullet-ridden file, and they don't check back to make sure Ted is actually dead or the file destroyed when the car explodes.
The car doesn't explode the way it should (the conspiracy has a lot of trouble with that) and Ted is soon on the run with the file. It's the oldest of suspense plots: the good guy has a file (or more recently, computer disk) and the bad guys will do anything to get it back. All of these plots take place in an alternate dimension, where copy machines do not exist and the bad guys believe the good guys when they say they haven't made a copy of the file... because it's actually true! Whether it's the 39 Steps or The X-Files, we can hardly go to the movie theaters or turn on the TV without seeing some poor schmuck (or beautiful woman) running from faceless minions trying to get that darn file back.
Now what should raise this silly plot above all of the other versions of this story we've seen is the tabloid nature of the file: That Hitler's daugter is alive... And she wants to occupy the White House! All right, now we're talking! That Hitler even had a daughter is only a remote historical possibility, but it's fun to think about, in a Hard Copy/Jerry Springer kind of way.
Which brings us to the central question... Who is Hitler's daughter? Well, we don't know. The movie is structured in such a way that we have three suspects, and we don't know which one is the titular character. All three characters (a reporter, the VPs wife, and a Senator) seem to be power hungry, and all three seem to be willing to claw (or sleep) their way to the top, but because we aren't supposed to know who is really Hitler's daughter until the end of the movie, none of the women ever actually do anything particularly evil! It's not so much "Hitler's daughter wants to occupy the White House" as "Hitler's daughter wants to be on Melrose Place."
So, what are we left with? Not a whole lot. The story doesn't unfold very smoothly, and there is nothing in this plot that we haven't seen before in any number of other conspiracy movies. Besides, why would Hitler's daughter go into politics? These days, the easiest way to spread evil throughout the world is to write bad TV movies.
This review copyright 1998 by Chris Holland and Scott Hamilton of Stomp Tokyo Video Reviews. http://members.aol.com/stomptokyo
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