Lizzie Borden took an axe
She gave her mother forty whacks
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.
Lizzie Borden got away
For her crime she did not pay.
- children's skipping rope song
First, a confession. Somehow, somewhen, during my nearly six decades of life and absorbing random elements of pop culture, I managed to conflate alleged axe murderer Lizzie Borden with the deaf and blind, pioneering disability activist Helen Keller.
Somewhere along the way I'd latched onto a self-invented reason for why Borden had become so infamous: not only did she murder her own parents, but she was deaf and blind as well.
Imagine my surprise when I sat down to watch Christina Ricci's portrayal of Borden and realised that the character wasn't actually blind or deaf!
Turns out her notoriety arose from the simple fact she was a woman accused of these heinous crimes.
Lizzie Borden Took An Axe is the 2014 TV movie that opened the door for the bonkers and wildly fictionalised Lizzie Borden Chronicles, an eight-episode, limited series (contradicting the end of the movie where it states the sisters never saw each other again).
In this parade of glorious Grand Guignol, Lizzie has become a coldly, calculating serial killer who could give Hannibal Lecter or Jason Voorhees a run for their money.
Compared to the campy mini-series it spawned, Lizzie Borden Took An Axe plays things much straighter, focussing on the initial murders of Lizzie's father, Andrew (Pontypool's Stephen McHattie) and stepmother, Abby (Sara Botsford).
After establishing that Lizzie and her older sister, Emma (Clea DuVall) don't exactly live in a happy home - their father is controlling and disappointed in them (as they haven't found husbands yet), while their stepmother (apparently) cares more for her own relatives than Lizzie and Emma - the film adds to Lizzie 's criminal profile by depicting her as a habitual liar, thief, societal rebel, and shoplifter.
Random bits of potential obfuscation are thrown in to Stephen Kay's script (such as a lurking soldier, who may - or may not - have been a lover of Lizzie), but he and director Nick Gomez are quite adamant that there is no mystery here: they want you to know Lizzie did it.
There are frequent dream-like sequences and brief flashbacks to the murders, not really showing Lizzie committing them, but strongly suggesting that is the case.
The police are also convinced that Lizzie did the deed, while - once the case comes to trial - her lawyer Andrew Jennings (Billy Campbell) plays up her innocent nature, the fact that she's a Sunday School teacher, and pulls out the old "how could a woman do this?" defence.
At point, the court learns of another random murder of a woman in her home that has just occurred, mimicking the style of the Borden murders, but then this is dismissed - without investigation - and never mentioned again.
Eventually the jury find Lizzie not guilty and she is freed.
However, the film's denouement, where Lizzie whispers her "confession" to Emma (intercut with more gruesome versions of the earlier flashbacks that leave no doubt as to who was swinging the axe) would have come as more of a surprise twist had the film not spent the previous 80-or-so minutes pointing the finger at Lizzie, saying: "She did it, but don't tell anybody!"
Honestly, I think, taking the two shows together, I feel the original murder, if better framed as a mystery (which it remains in reality), would have been more deserving of the mini-series treatment.
That would have allowed time to explore all the little plot hooks that pop up in the movie and are then forgotten in the next breath.
As wild and, yes, entertaining as The Lizzie Borden Chronicles was, to my mind, nothing was gained by taking a real-life character like Lizzie and transforming her into a serial killer in this manner.
The mystery around the single incident that made her name is enough.
Following it up with pure, over-the-top, fiction is only going to muddy the waters, mixing fact with fiction in this way, so that some viewers will no doubt mistake one for the other.
It's all too easily done.
