TV REVIEWS : A Devilish Jackson in ‘Empty Cradle’

The string of tots-in-jeopardy TV movies continues this weekend with the divertingly empty thriller “Empty Cradle,” wherein an ex-Charlie’s Angel, Kate Jackson, turns demon from hell and steals babies literally straight from the womb. Think of it as “The Hand That Rocks the Uterus.”

This tawdry telefilm (at 9 p.m. Sunday on ABC, Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42) was inspired, so they say, by the true account of a nutso nurse who feigned her own pregnancy while waiting to snatch a live baby at birth. This she managed to pull off by surreptitiously switching the real newborn with a stillborn fetus, sending the distraught biological mom home alone to mourn a miscarriage instead of a kidnaping.

But, in this fictionalized scenario, heroine Lori Loughlin (“Full House”) will have none of it, insisting the girl she delivered is still alive even while bad-guy hospital administrators insist she’s a paranoid whose supposed drug use caused her to miscarry. Despite widespread disbelief, Loughlin sets out to find what really happened--even as baby-snatcher Jackson sets out to find another pregnant dupe, this time to procure a boy.

Between this, “Baby Jessica” and “Precious Victims,” it hasn’t been a good couple of weeks to be a pregnant woman and an inveterate prime-time watcher. (Not since “It’s Alive 2” . . .)

But if “Empty Cradle” is outrightly the most lurid of these recent three, it also fares best by having the courage of its own luridness. No small part of this is Jackson, whose part-Stepford Mom, part-Beelzebub villainy makes up in psycho-campiness what it lacks in grace notes.

In the straight role, Loughlin turns in a surprisingly fine bit of anguished feistiness. Director Paul Schneider keeps a reasonable amount of suspense in gear, even in those slack moments when Rebecca Soladay’s script becomes as padded as mama wanna-be Jackson’s tummy.