by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This morning I watched a quite good thriller I’d recorded
from Lifetime over the weekend: Willed to Kill, a 2012 production from Incendo Media that featured Sarah Jane Morris
(hot!) as Boston homicide
detective Karyn Mitchell (the pretentious spelling of the first name — what’s
wrong with “Karen”? — bothers me a little), who’s already blown away two
previous serial killers when, in one of the most chilling opening sequences
ever put on film, she enters a house where a knife-wielding psycho has tied up
and gagged a real woman, set her at a dining table with a bunch of mannequins,
and is preparing to torture and kill her. When Karyn crashes the scene, the
baddie starts teasing her, asking who she would want to play her in the movie
they’re going to make of his life (for his own account, he’s so closely
channeling The Silence of the Lambs
his choice to play himself would obviously be Anthony Hopkins!), then goes
after her with his knife and she shoots him in self-defense. For this, she’s
christened “Dirty Harriet” by her colleagues on the Boston PD (of course, this
being a Lifetime movie, Montreal is “playing” Boston), and the fruits of her
labors are an internal-affairs investigation, a dressing-down by her chief, Lt.
Schneider (David McIlwraith), a sour attitude from her partner and former
fiancé, Gavin McNaab (Ross McCall), and mandatory therapy sessions with Dr.
Aaron Kade (Michael Riley). Then a couple of murders occur in which the victims
are scarred post-mortem with the Greek letter that symbolizes Hades, trademark
of the so-called “Hades Killer” who operated 15 years earlier.
Karyn is
convinced the new killings are the work of a copycat, and she has to deal with
a succession of weirdos falsely confessing to the crimes as well as the
watchful eyes of her fellow cops, who want her to catch Hades, all right, but
to catch him alive this time and allow the judicial system to take its course
instead of summarily executing him. Director Philippe Gagnon and writer James
Taylor Phillips give us a surprisingly broad suspect pool namely by making just
about every male in Karyn’s vicinity so unbearably twitchy we’re sure one of them must be the killer. Among the suspects she
encounters are Arthur Brady (Kent McQuaid) — whose recently deceased uncle was
one of the suspects in the original Hades murders — along with another wanna-be
who actually kills someone in his efforts to convince the cops he is Hades, but
whose crime has just the opposite effect when Karyn points out that he was
considerably sloppier than the real Hades (or at least the new one — you know a thriller plot is convoluted when one of the crimes
is committed by a copycat of the copycat!). Willed to Kill’s plot takes an interesting turn when Gavin invites
Karyn to his upcoming wedding — “You’re not supposed to marry the rebound!” she
insists, though he says he got her pregnant and therefore had to — and Karyn has a meet-cute outside a gym with
Mark Hanson (Dylan Bruce, a considerably hunkier good guy than we usually get
in a Lifetime movie) and they fuck on the first date and “get serious”
thereafter — at least until Karyn decides, on the basis of his inside
information and his similar background to the killer (notably the fact that
they both lost their wives — Karyn knows this because the killer has been in
regular phone contact with her, slipping her bits of background and always hanging up just in time to make sure the police
can’t complete the trace on his calls), that he’s Hades and arrests him.
The film
cycles through various false suspects and red herrings — including the one I
thought was going to be the guilty party, a twitchy reporter who was following
her and stalking her to get stories about the case, until he was killed in the
next-to-last act — and finally reveals that Hades was [spoiler
alert!] Karyn’s therapist, Dr. Kade, and
that Karyn’s father was the original
Hades. Karyn’s father was never charged with those crimes but was bad enough he
was caught and executed anyway, and Karyn actually turned him in when she was
16 — but she agonized about doing that for six months, during which Hades I
murdered Dr. Kade’s parents, and rather than just kill her Dr. Kade decided to
become Hades II, picking his victims from the ranks of career criminals so he
wouldn’t knock off someone who could be considered an “innocent victim,” and
comparing himself to Karyn as someone who also killed criminals instead of trusting the legal
process. The story is far-fetched and stretches the bounds of legitimate
suspension of disbelief, but within that it at least makes sense, the
resolution is (more or less) logical and the overall effect is quite chilling
and offers everything you want from a suspense film. Director Gagnon stages the
action expertly, up to and including the final confrontation (Dr. Kade is
planning to take Karyn to the roof of the police building, push her off and
then report to his superiors that in their last session she threatened suicide,
so they’ll believe him when he says she killed herself), which Karyn extricates
herself from in a believable manner while it’s Dr. Kade who falls off the
building and dies. (That was a pity; I was hoping the final frames would be her
turning him over to Lt. Schneider and saying, “See? I can take someone alive!”)
