| “ | Listen here, you little monster. I am mightier than you are. And I always get what I want, so back off! | „ |
| ~ Lawanda Dumore to Junior Healy. |
LaWanda Dumore is the main antagonist of the film Problem Child 2. She is a rich and powerful woman, but also very petty and superficial, who in the film targets Ben Healy, father of the protagonist Junior, deciding to marry him and clashing with the opposite opinion of the young Junior.
She was portrayed by Laraine Newman, who also voiced Baby Doll in The New Batman Adventures.
Biography[]
The photos of LaWanda's Dumore's last six husbands.
LaWanda is the richest and most powerful woman in town. Apparently her family has lived in Mortville for generations and she stole the famed Love Rock - the town's famed landmark which, according to legend, has the power to make people fall in love - from the local Native Americans. To wealth, however, you also combine great selfishness and great superficiality. After seeing Ben Healy in his bank talking to an employee to open an account, the woman - who has six failed marriages behind her, and whose husbands curiously all look very much like Ben - falls in love with him and plans to meet him, woo him and marry him. However, while consulting some records on Ben's family, Lawanda discovers that he has a son, and that Junior has several peculiar backgrounds - including traveling with an escaped assassin (who had actually kidnapped him) and beating a bloody under 12 baseball team to the point of sending them to the hospital (actually he had done it because the members of that team had insulted him and Ben) - commenting, annoyed, that "that child is evil". When Smith, her sycophantic assistant factotum asks her if she should leave her alone, she replies that LaWanda will take care of Junior.
As the beginning of her courtship, LaWanda drives to Ben's house with several cars loaded with gifts for the man, but instead (Ben went out with Junior to spend some time with him) she finds her father Big Ben Healy who, having gone broke, is immediately struck by the woman and her enormous fortune, making friends with her and deciding to help her convince her son to marry her, so that she can receive financial help from the two to recover from financial problems.
LaWanda thus spends the afternoon refurbishing Ben's house from top to bottom, and she introduces herself to him when Ben returns with Junior, agreeing with him to meet again in the future for dinner with her family. When Junior – annoyed by the idea of his father getting attention from a woman – throws a vase of flowers on the floor, Lawanda mops the floor by pretending kindness and affability, telling Ben not to be too harsh on his son and whispering to Junior that if he tries to put a spanner in her wheels, she'll make him pay. When Junior, after a verbal confrontation with LaWanda – who insults him and shouts at him – notices with dismay and anger that his room too has been redecorated, with furnishings, furniture and gadgets inspired by clowns - which Junior hates -, Junior swears revenge to the woman and fills all the dishes of the dinner she has prepared with his pet cockroaches. During dinner, LaWanda eats one of these cockroaches without realizing it – since it was hidden under a lettuce leaf that she had pierced with a fork – and does not notice another cockroach walking on her face (noticed instead by Big Ben which, after asking her what was in the salad – which was moving preventing him from picking it up with his fork -, he looks her in the face remaining horrified). When the salad bowl then spills revealing its contents of insects that invade the table, LaWanda is horrified in turn, while some cockroaches swarm on her.
Later, after an angry and disappointed Ben berates Junior for not keeping his promise to behave and doesn't believe him when he tells him that LaWanda is an evil woman and that she hates him, LaWanda tells (obviously lying) to Ben that perhaps he was too harsh and proposes that Ben speak to Junior herself. Left alone with her, he verbally attacks him and threatens him by telling him that she will marry Ben, whether Junior likes it or not and that, once she marries him, she will send Junior to a boarding school in Baghdad. After these threats, Junior tries again to warn Ben but the man, embittered by his behavior, does not believe him.
Meanwhile Junior makes friends with Trixie Young, a girl his age as pestilent as him, and with whom he had initially had several clashes. Having noticed that Ben and Annie, Trixie's mother and nurse at the school the two children attend, have a good relationship, the two children plan to get engaged. After a new trouble created by Junior – who sends Nippy, Big Ben's dog, into a catatonic state in an attempt to hypnotize him to turn him against LaWanda-, LaWanda finally manages to convince Ben to get married, promising him that her influence will be positive for Junior . After trying in vain for his father to dissuade him from making the mistake of marrying LaWanda, in the aftermath of Ben and LaWanda's wedding, Junior manages to make believe that the woman has hydrophobia by forging the results of the blood tests she took (replacing his blood with a rabid dog blood sample stolen from the van of two vets who came to treat Nippy). However, not even hospitalization will dissuade LaWanda from postponing the wedding, to which Junior manages to get her to have a facial plastic operation by stealing the file of a patient suffering from protagonist delusions who wanted to have his nose stretched to become famous. Unfortunately, not even this will serve as an obstacle for LaWanda, who runs for cover by having a new surgical operation done a few hours after the wedding, mockingly commenting to Junior (who was amazed after seeing her without the wedding veil on her face) that he was wrong, if he thought to have defeated her. As the wedding nears its conclusion, Trixie bursts into the ceremony driving a bulldozer in which she carries the Rock of Love, which she rolls along the wedding carpet. LaWanda shouts her hatred for children and her desire to wipe them off the face of the Earth if she could – finally revealing herself to a shocked Ben in his deceit and meanness – and absurdly tries to stop the Rock of Love rolling towards her by ordering to stop, being run over by the monument but remaining unharmed. When Ben then declares himself to Annie, Big Ben, trying in vain to convince him to marry LaWanda, decides at the suggestion of the same son to declare himself to LaWanda and to marry her. LaWanda initially dismisses Big Ben about her saying she hates her family, but Big Ben tells her that he is different from her son and that he loves her. Touched, LaWanda accepts her statement and kisses him. Their "wedding" ends with a prank from Junior and Trixie, who blow up the wedding cake on them with a stick of dynamite and with Nippy emitting a huge amount of feces (as a side effect of a well-known brand of foods that the vets gave him) in front of the two spouses, to the great disgust of LaWanda and the embarrassment of Big Ben.
Personality[]
Lawanda has a meanness and wickeness matched only by her wealth. She is greedy, superficial and materialistic, and she has no qualms about throwing those who can't pay the rent onto the street, commenting bored "poor, poor, always poor!" and she fiercely hates children, not having a problem with insulting and threatening them. Despite this, she seems to hate greedy men like her (complaining when the gigolos she frequents constantly ask her for money) and longs for a man who is not superficial and who would be willing to love her regardless of her assets.
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