by Rich Moreland, September 2015
Anyone in the film business knows that sequels are risky investments and often fall short of the original. In the case of B Skow’s Daddy’s Girls 2, we have an exception.
Skow has the devilish habit of leaving his plot lines unresolved, in effect persuading the viewer to reach his own conclusions. This is particularly true for Control and The Gardner, two excellent films previously reviewed on this blog.
With the Daddy’s Girls sequel, Skow fills in the blanks from the opening act and leaves the door ajar for yet another film which I hope he will consider.
* * *
The Daddy Complex
Much different from the hopeful, airy beginning of Daddy’s Girls, the sequel begins with the malevolent assault on Quincy. The viewer follows Samantha through the open window and into the violence she creates. Skow’s camera handles the chaos with quick brutal stabs. Right eye bloodied, Quincy is terrorized; the audience is left reeling.
What happens next is the shocker. Gina bursts in to rescue Quincy, leaving Bob alone with Samantha. Instead of fighting the moment, they have a lustful go at each other. The sex is as nasty and sharp as Samantha’s knife and includes anal (a nice follow-up from the cane fetish in the first movie). A willing participant in her own degradation, Samantha is down and dirty, smiling, moaning, and loving every minute of her passion for Bob.
Gina returns unexpectedly . . . and we later learn of the divorce that ensues.
Six months pass and Quincy is away in therapy. Her right eye victimized by an avenger’s slash, she lamely seeks some sort of redemption. But temptation forever looms.
This becomes the central theme of Daddy’s Girls 2.
As Samantha did in the first film, Quincy returns home after her initial treatment. The reaction from dad is unexpected. Bob is withholding his affection, Quincy tells her therapist, and has plans to marry his prostitute turned mistress, Marla.
Samantha
A petulant Quincy speaks of her now gone but not forgotten mother in a way that also indicts Marla. Her therapist, Tom, listens.
“He was mine, not hers,” she says angrily.
At this point, Skow manipulates the father issue into an ageism fetish that features other daddies. Quincy will compete with Marla for Bob while older men will pursue her Daddy’sGirl95 persona, complicating the question of just who are daddy’s girls?
Open Legs
Quincy has a thing for “mature” guys; it’s a coping mechanism to battle her self-esteem issues. During her sessions with Doctor Tom, she sits with her legs spread and at one point puts her feet on his chair as they talk. He admits an interest in her and she wears a pouty face that would make every cam girl proud.
What moves the narrative along is the therapy set-up. Though the first film establishes the Freudian “Father Complex,” the treatment session is not psychoanalytical in method where the psychiatrist sits behind the patient so as not to distract her unconscious thoughts. Instead, Tom uses the confrontational style of Albert Ellis’ Rational-Emotive Therapy. The doctor and patient sit opposite each other. Tom demands that Quincy answer rapid fire questions to bring out her true feelings.
As Freud predicted, the doctor becomes a father figure, igniting another version of daddy issues.
Thoughts about her father while working on Allen.
Proof is evident when Quincy talks about Allen, played by Seth Gamble, a boy her own age with whom Bob is encouraging a relationship. The Quincy/Allen pairing isn’t clicking (though Allen and Quincy will have sex later) because, Quincy says, the only way she can “swallow his load” is to think about her father.
While Quincy deals with her therapy, Bob is readying Marla for the family setting. Marla is his new daddy’s girl, clearly noted when she mentions to him that she was quite young when Quincy was born. They are almost the same age, a vital point in the film.
Each time the sessions fill with tension, a bell rings to signal the end of the hour. The build-up is an effective touch because Quincy will take on a special treatment with Tom to scratch the itch of her daddy desires.
Our Father
Skow uses Biblical suggestions to reinforce Quincy’s hope to be “a good girl again.” Of course, her sincerity is questionable. As she reads a Bible, she resists the desire to reach for her crotch in an all too shallow moment. Perhaps, the “Our Father” part got her juices flowing.
The Faces
Pardon another Biblical offering here. Remember the faces in Samantha’s bedroom mentioned in the first film? Perhaps in the second drawing, Skow is reminding the audience that nuns are “married” to God, the ultimate Father figure.
On an occasion when Quincy refers to Marla as a prostitute, Tom injects Jesus and Mary Magdalene as an example of forgiveness, but the viewer gets the idea it’s merely a one size fits all comment. It does, however, bring up a critical part of the story: the emergence of Marla.
Once a Whore Always a Whore
Despite her whining and sanctimonious complaints, Quincy is about to get a stepmother who, she insists, is “a whore and my dad deserves better and so do I.” Laughable irony because Quincy’s own self-creation as Daddy’sGirl95 enables her sexual frolics with all her daddies and even her stepmother-in-waiting, as Skow eventually reveals.
Despite her life-threatening attack, Quincy is not tempered and remains instantly judgmental of Bob’s other women.
“Once a whore, always a whore,” she pompously declares of Marla. But the most revealing moment of the film happens when Marla tries to reach out to Quincy.
Marla
Resisting Marla’s kindness when she knocks on her bedroom door, Quincy asks for Bob. He’s “at the office” Marla replies and Quincy lowers the boom right then.
Chuckling, she fires a barb through the closed door. Bob used those very words on “my mom when he was out cheating with you,” she shouts, then picks up her Bible.
Marla is stunned.
The revelation of the real daddy’s girls is just beginning.
