How sad is this?

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

One of the things you can count on with Sean Astin is that he will give you a great performance no matter how lousy the script or dialogue. This is a made for TV Lifetime film with the expected quality. Tim (Sean Astin) and Cheryl (Samaire Armstrong) adopt a bay girl. The film implies Tim has some male issues.Along with the baby girl, they also get as a bonus the murderous biological father (Brendan Fehr) as a stalker wanting his bay back, one that the state took away. The action builds as expected, including the Lifetime twist.Lifetime fans will love it.I am less enthusiastic.

Maybe one of the most unfortunate things about this film was the potential for a solid thriller was there. Granted its probably not the most unique story and fairly typical in the stalker thriller concept but it still could have been entertaining. Instead, the film is one of the most amateur, slapped together, and poorly researched and directed films I have ever seen. The performances in the film aren't terrible but they certainly aren't good. However, with a horrendous script and awful directing, there is only so much an actor can do. The film opens with a scene that shocks and rivets you, and then very quickly you realize this is an amateur production by definition. There is a twist in the story but due to the poor writing you see that twist coming from a million miles with very non-subtle acting and clues.Sean Astin gives his best B-Movie performance as the new Dad trying to protect his family. He's unlikable and almost annoying in the role which is really unfortunate. He can't carry the movie. TV actress Samaire Armstrong just seems ridiculous in the film. Her and Astin have zero chemistry and seem awkward together. Monet Mazur plays their social worker with a secret past. She does alright but its definitely a TV performance that doesn't hit any home runs. Brendan Fehr probably gives the best performance in the whole movie which is good because he is the evil villain so to speak. Its truly unfortunate he didn't have a better script because his villain could have been really something. TV 80's icon Michael Gross shows up in a cameo role and comes across as completely cheesy.I literally laughed out loud when I saw co-writer, and director Micho Rutare's experience. This is the guy who co-wrote cheese-fests Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus, Bigfoot and Meteor Apocalypse. There is a certain market for those cheesy disaster/monster type flicks but why would that director then go and do what should have been a serious thriller? He took no attempt at making this serious and turned it into a complete joke. Probably the worst part is how completely unbelievable the entire thing was because of a complete lack of research. There is really no reason to see this so called thriller. I didn't give it a complete zero because it was just barely tolerable but no one should ever push themselves to see this. 3/10

This thriller is a good one since you don't realize through 3/4 of the film that it is actually a thriller.You will first come to view the police and adoption agency both inadequate in providing for protection when an adopting couple begin to be immediately harassed by the biological father. Their inability to do anything to ameliorate the situation is shocking and shows what's wrong with the adoption system. Of course, this leads to further mayhem for all concerned.You will begin to suspect that something is terribly amiss when the doctor in charge of the agency is murdered. It is at this point that the movie becomes a thriller with the real mother coming out of the wood-work and that in itself is a definite shocker.

"Adopting Terror" is an intense and rather confusing melodrama which has two pages listed on IMDb.com, one a pre-production page that does not identify it as a TV-movie — were they hoping for a theatrical release and sold it to Lifetime when they didn't get one? — and one a post-release page but one which doesn't identify many of the actors, including star Sean Astin, John Astin's son. The plot: Tim Broadbent (Sean Astin, a stocky guy of medium height who doesn't really look that much like his dad, John Astin of "The Addams Family") and his wife Cheryl (who appears to have been played by Kristen Quintrall — the IMDb.com pages list her character as "Nikki" and this suggests a last-minute script revision by writers Micho Rutare, who also directed, and Nik Frank-Lehrer) adopt a few-months-old baby who's been in state custody. They do this through something called the Community First Adoption Agency, headed by Dr. Ziegler (Michael Gross), and the social worker assigned to the case to supervise the adoption and recommend whether it should be made permanent at the final hearing is a willowy young (younger than Cheryl!) white woman named Fay Hopkins (Monet Mazur).What the Broadbents don't know but we do — at least we do if we watched this movie from the beginning (a couple of people who posted to IMDb.com about it didn't and therefore were confused) — is that the baby, Mona, was taken away from her parents in the first place and made a war of the state because she was living with her dad, Kevin Anderson (the tall, dark and sexy Brendan Fehr) when Child Protective Services got a call that she was being neglected, and when their worker (an African-American, like so many voice-of-reason authority figures in Lifetime movies) came over, Kevin shot her — presumably non-fatally, since he was convicted only of simple assault and was paroled in less than a year — then was ambushed by police outside the apartment building where he was living and arrested, while the baby was taken by the state and put in foster care until the Broadbents saw her picture online and initiated adoption proceedings.The Broadbents are having Mona's one-year birthday party in a local park (there's a mention that this story takes place in San Diego but no recognizable San Diego locations appear) when Kevin crashes the party and takes out his own camera (a disposable film camera rather than the digital ones the Broadbents and Cheryl's parents are using, which clearly symbolizes the class differences between them) and takes Mona's picture. From then on Kevin stalks the Broadbents, and when Tim tries to turn the tables and stalk Kevin at his house (where he noticed 8" x 10" blow-ups of his photos of Mona on the wall), Kevin turns that around and gets a restraining order against him. The Broadbents go to Dr. Ziegler and ask for information on contacting Mona's birth mother, and are told there's nothing he can do because it was a closed adoption and mom's privacy needs to be protected — whereupon a furious Tim asks Ziegler how Kevin Anderson got their address if the information was supposed to be so confidential. Kevin shows up outside the home of a couple who are friends of the Broadbents, whose son bites Mona on the forehead during a play session — and a smarmily apologetic Fay tells the Broadbents on her next visit that she's going to have to photograph that and put it in their file.Fay's rather smarmy manner — plus the fact that she's white on a network where virtually all the legitimate members of the helping professions are Black — makes us suspicious of her from the get-go, but about two-thirds of the way through the film the big reversal comes: Fay, who claimed to have masters' degrees in both social work and clinical psychology, is really an impostor; she's Mona's biological mother and she and Kevin are involved in a plot to derail the Broadbents' chances at legally adopting Mona so they can take her back for themselves. Kevin breaks into Dr. Ziegler's office by disguising himself as a janitor and kills him just when he's about to stumble on the real identity of Mona's birth mother (he's Web-surfing on his laptop for the information when he's croaked), and before that Kevin showed up at the hospital where the Broadbents were supposed to get Mona her childhood immunizations, kidnapped Mona but then gave her back when he was caught (once again he was in disguise, this time wearing the green scrubs the hospital itself issued to its own staff).Though "Adopting Terror" is a bit melodramatic in the usual Lifetime manner, and it suffers from their decision to cut back on the soft-core porn that used to be the highlight of many a Lifetime movie (we only get a brief, furtive, shadowy glimpse of Kevin and Fay doing it, and they're fully clothed), it's also a quite competent if unoriginal thriller that gets better as it goes along, the exposition gets out of the way and Rutare's direction gets tighter and more effective.