GATES OF PARADISE/ VC ANDREWS GATES OF PARADISE
US, 2019, 88 minutes, Colour.
Lucy Boys, Jason Priestley, Johanna Newmarch, Jason Cermak, Pauline Egan, Michael Karl Richards, Ben Sullivan, Keenan Tracy, Daphne Zuniga.
Directed by Gail Harvey.
This is the fourth film in the series focusing on the central character, Heaven. VC Andrews died but Andrew Neiderman took over and published many novels with her name. However, Heaven and her husband Logan are killed in a car accident in this story and attention goes to their daughter, Annie, also the subject of the fifth novel, film in the series, Web of Dreams.
18 years have passed since the last story, Fallen Hearts. Annie is born at the end of that film. Now she is turning 18. In the last film there was a reconciliation between Heaven and her rather promiscuous sister, Fanny, and the complications of Fanny’s son, Luke. By this stage, family seem to be getting on well enough, Fanny still taunting Heaven, being provocative in flirting with Logan. In fact, this is disastrous when Fanny invites Logan to dance during Annie’s birthday party, Heaven upset, dragging Logan away, his reckless driving, drunk, the car crash. And Annie surviving, time in hospital, and her not being able to walk.
From the past stories there is also the young Drake, son of Heaven’s putative father, Luke. There is also Luke, son of Fanny, and a complication from the previous story of Logan’s one night stand with Fanny. By now, Annie is very much devoted to Luke who goes off to study medicine.
With the death of her parents, Annie is visited by Tony Taterton, again played, perhaps a little less stolidly, by Jason Priestley. And once more, he intervenes, seeing Heaven and her mother in Annie. He transfers to her to the ancestral home, looks after her every need but virtually imprisons her, no phone connection or outreach. He is obsessed as he has been throughout.
Standout is the guest performance by Daphne Zuniga as the supervising nurse, vicious in her treatment of Annie, yet able to be smiling and charm in in her encounters with Drake.
Annie eventually contrives to get out of her room, meets Troy, finds that the model house that her mother had given her for her birthday is Troy’s house. Eventually it emerges that Heaven had spent the night with Troly – and that he is her father! There is a confrontation with Tony, his collapse, death. Luke is allowed back – and Annie reveals that Troy is her father and so they are not blood related… And on to the next episode.
