Did you mean "orphan," a person who has lost his parents, or "often," frequently

I had a little bit of time off last week, and I finally got around to doing something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.

I saw Orphan.

Yes, I know it’s tacky and horrible looking, and yes, I know it’s probably the least classy choice of any movie currently in theatres that I could possibly have made.

And what makes it worse is that I’d had the hell spoiled out of every last plot twist in the movie for about a month. I didn’t care. I wanted to see it. And you know what? I still screamed out loud, despite knowing the premise backwards and forwards. That little kid is just straight up creepy.

The thing is, it is a tacky, horrible movie. But I actually feel like it taught me some valuable and interesting life lessons.

(Stop here if you don’t want the crap spoiled out of the movie)

I know that a lot of adoption groups had concerns that Orphan would make people have second thoughts about adopting, and while I think that’s a bit of an overreaction, I will agree that it plays on a very primal sort of fear or uncertainty about bringing an outsider into the family/tribe.

But I don’t think it would turn reasonable people who were already thinking about adopting off of the idea of adoption altogether. In fact, I think it might just make them go about their adoption more responsibly. And so Lesson # 1 is: Be sure the adoption agency you’re working with is reputable, and has thorough and verified background information on the child you want to adopt.

Because the real mistake the parents in the film made was not adopting. It was adopting from a group of lazy ass nuns who apparently couldn’t be bothered to put a phone call through to Russia and make sure that the orphan they were peddling was actually a child, and not a serial killing dwarf prostitute who’d escaped from an insane asylum.

Goddamn lazy ass nuns. They ruin everything.

Lesson #2: Take your goddamn child to the dentist. I know she says she doesn’t want to go to the dentist. No child wants to go to the dentist. Hell, I’ve been personal friends with my dentist for years, and even I’m not crazy about seeing him after all the cash and Novocain that’s changed hands in the last year.

But you take your goddamn child to the dentist. In the first place, it’s sound responsible parenting to make sure your child has healthy teeth and gums. In the second place, it starts the child on the road to a lifetime of good oral hygiene. And in the third place, it’s the easiest way to find out if your child actually is a child, or if she’s a 33 year old Estonian serial killing dwarf prostitute who’s wearing false children’s teeth to disguise her jacked up Eastern European grill.

Lesson #3: Don’t advertise your profoundly deaf 7-year-old’s gift for lip reading quite so broadly. Because on the off chance that you do adopt a psychotic dwarf whore by accident, there’s a solid possibility that said dwarf whore will get on the 7-year-old’s good side, and get her to use her mad lip reading skillz to glean information.

Besides, if you’re the only one who knows about the lip reading skillz, you’re the only one who gets to manipulate them, right?

Lesson #4: Men are idiots, and also jerks. I know that it’s probably really difficult to believe your wife when she tells you that the sweet little Russian urchin you’ve taken into your home murdered a nun and is trying to kill your other children. It’s probably even harder to believe this if said wife has been slightly unbalanced since suffering a stillbirth, and has a history of alcoholism.

But if the pattern of weird accidents and mysterious nun deaths in your neighborhood starts right after you brought the aforementioned urchin into your home, don’t you think that maybe you should at least consider that there might be something to what she’s saying? I mean, I’m not expecting anyone to go from zero to psychopathic dwarf hooker, but maybe you weigh her words a little carefully? Maybe you at least don’t act like such a fucking prick and accuse her of being drunk again, and threaten to take the kids from her?

And barring that, even if you don’t believe a word your wife says, is it really the best idea to kill an entire bottle of red wine on your own when you’re alone in your freakishly isolated house with your profoundly deaf 7-year-old and your adopted 9-year-old? Even if there’s no chance in the world that the 9-year-old is secretly a 33 year old mental patient/dwarf/prostitute, that seems like pretty irresponsible parenting.

Lesson #5: Be careful about where you hide your diary. Seriously, in the window seat? Could you be any more obvious? That’s where every heroine in YA lit since the dawn of time hid her diary. It seems like you’d find a better place to stash that if you want your privacy. Particularly if the diary you’re hiding contains gems of information about where you hid your booze when you were drinking, your husband’s affair, how you almost killed your profoundly deaf daughter in a drunken accident, and the details of your traumatic stillbirth. That’s personal shit, even if you don’t have an Estonian dwarf whore in your house who’s an expert at using information to manipulate people.

Lesson #6a: Child Protective Services will send a child who says her adoptive mother broke her arm in a rage back to the house with that mother. I don’t know. Maybe CPS were the only rational people in the whole movie, and could sense somehow that Esther broke her own arm in a vise for the purpose of pinning it on her mother.

Lesson #6b: However, if you slap a child in front of witnesses, the men in white coats will fucking sedate you. Does this seem like a serious overreaction to anyone else? I mean, even if you don’t know that the child getting slapped is a psychotic bitch who just tried to kill her adopted brother—TWICE—all the woman’s doing is slapping her kid.

And lets face it: that little bitch needed slapping, bad. Hell, maybe if someone had slapped her years earlier, she would’ve become a dwarf biochemist instead of a psychopathic serial killing dwarf whore.

Lesson #7: Always have a back up plan. That’s one of the things I admire about Esther—if things didn’t work out the way she’d imagined, she always had an alternative. Plan A: Get adopted; wreck adoptive parents’ marriage; seduce adoptive father. And if that didn’t work, there’s always Plan B: kill entire family; burn the fucking house down.

Just think about how many of us get stuck because our first career path or whatever didn’t pan out, and we hadn’t thought of an alternative. Esther was smarter than that. If the whole father seduction thing didn’t work out, she always had serial killing and arson to fall back on.

And I have to say, that’s probably for the best, because the whole father seducing end of the operation didn’t seem to be going well. We know she’d had at least three disappointments in that department, and she didn’t seem to be too good at it. So maybe she should stick with the serial killing, since that’s where her strengths seem to lie.

Lesson #8: Don’t buy a freakishly isolated house. I know there’s something to be said for having your own lot, and yes, the house is gorgeous. But I spent about the last thirty minutes of the movie thinking “that shit would not go down in my neighborhood.” Shots get fired around here, yes. But never several of them from within the same house. And if, for example, an Estonian dwarf whore was chasing me through my house, and I had to crawl out a second story window to get away from her, I could yell down to the people in the street “THERE IS A FUCKING MIDGET SERIAL KILLER IN MY HOUSE!!! CALL 911!!!”

And even if they were like my prick husband and didn’t believe me about the whole serial killing midget thing, someone would eventually call the cops and complain about the crazy white girl on the roof disturbing the peace.

Lesson #9: I don’t care how dead someone looks, if you have the chance, you shoot them in the fucking face. This is a lesson you pretty much learn from every horror/thriller/spy movie or TV show (I used to scream it out loud during ALIAS), but it still applies. I don’t care if you’re sure that there’s no way the 33 year old psychotic Estonian serial killing escaped mental patient dwarf whore could’ve survived you falling on her through the glass roof of your freakishly isolated house’s conservatory and landing directly on top of her. If the gun comes out of her hand, you stand up, you brush yourself off, and you put three in her head, just for good measure.

Or, if you absolutely can’t bring yourself to kill her. . .yet. . . you at least pick the damn thing up and blow out both her kneecaps so she can’t move. That’s just common sense.

What you don’t do, under any circumstances, is leave her lying there with the gun right next to her hand. No matter how much glass is stuck in her, or how dead she looks.

In fact, in this matter, I have to respect Esther more than Kate, the adoptive mother. Because at least when Esther killed someone, she killed the hell out of them. If one conk to the skull with a claw hammer didn’t put you out of business, she’d conk you until your skull was pulp to make sure. If engineering your fall from a super high tree-house didn’t work, she’d try to smother you with a pillow.

And I know that hell supposedly hath no fury like a woman scorned, but a dwarf whore scorned will stab you with a kitchen knife so many times that there’s no way you survived, not even in the most implausible of horror movies.

Which, let’s face it, this is. Or did my repeated use of the phrase “33 year old escaped mental patient serial killing Estonian dwarf whore” not tip you off to that?