There was a made-for-cable movie some years ago with a particularly macabre story line that went something like this:
The members of a certain city/town have a pact whereby, when one of them reaches a certain agreed-upon age, they are killed by a relative. Worse, the person being killed dies by being drowned: the relative forces his/her head underwater until the inevitable happens.
To top it all off, the whole thing takes place in some sort of ceremonial fountain where the townspeople regularly gather to watch the ritual being carried out.
(If this sounds a bit like Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, it is. However, the killing is based on someone's age rather than the luck of a random drawing and everyone, it seems, is subject to it.)
The Dramatic Tension kicks in when someone is drowning a hapless relative, same as usual, and suddenly decides…they can't do it. For whatever reason, the would-be murderer simply cannot bring himself to carry out what they are pledged to do.
The rest of the plot revolves around the fact that the ritualised murder pact was made with some sort of hard-nosed outside group (aliens? used car salesmen? I can't remember). In any case, the townspeople have broken the agreement, the aliens/used car salesmen are not of the forgive-and-forget sort, and they waste little time in letting the now-rebellious townspeople know They Have Erred.
Does this sound familiar? I hope so, because I would like to view it again to see if it's as good (or as bad) as I remember it.
Re: Looking for title of grotesque, difficult-to-forget Lifetime (?) film
Looking for title of grotesque, difficult-to-forget Lifetime (?) film
The members of a certain city/town have a pact whereby, when one of them reaches a certain agreed-upon age, they are killed by a relative. Worse, the person being killed dies by being drowned: the relative forces his/her head underwater until the inevitable happens.
To top it all off, the whole thing takes place in some sort of ceremonial fountain where the townspeople regularly gather to watch the ritual being carried out.
(If this sounds a bit like Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, it is. However, the killing is based on someone's age rather than the luck of a random drawing and everyone, it seems, is subject to it.)
The Dramatic Tension kicks in when someone is drowning a hapless relative, same as usual, and suddenly decides…they can't do it. For whatever reason, the would-be murderer simply cannot bring himself to carry out what they are pledged to do.
The rest of the plot revolves around the fact that the ritualised murder pact was made with some sort of hard-nosed outside group (aliens? used car salesmen? I can't remember). In any case, the townspeople have broken the agreement, the aliens/used car salesmen are not of the forgive-and-forget sort, and they waste little time in letting the now-rebellious townspeople know They Have Erred.
Does this sound familiar? I hope so, because I would like to view it again to see if it's as good (or as bad) as I remember it.