Primo Baby

Stars: Esther Purves-Smith, Duncan Regehr. A Canadian family film from some years back, Primo Baby is the latest in a string of girl and horse stories (Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken, Dark Horse, etc.). In this mawkish melodrama 15-year-old Paschal (Purves-Smith) is introduced as a racetrack waif whose father is in jail. Early on, she's taken in by a new foster family named Armstrong, comprised of a business-like rancher/breeder father and his wheelchair-bound bitter teenage son Clancy. When Clancy decides it's time to put the going-blind horse Primo Baby to rest, Paschal pipes up and asks that the horse be given to her as a responsibility. In thoroughly predictable fashion, Paschal learns (in incredibly compressed movie time) how to train and even ride Primo Baby, whom she then enters in the $200,000 Calgary Cup Race. Besides the fact that Paschal's character is so relentlessly unappealing (her whiny voice is enough to set one's teeth on edge), the story twists are so dramatically unconvincing that only the most naive of viewers are going to swallow the increasingly ludicrous turn of events. Audience: People who want to watch a good contemporary adolescent girl and horse story should watch Dark Horse instead, or even the classic girl and horse story National Velvet..