by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This morning I ran a recently aired Lifetime movie called Dirty
Teacher, which I’d hoped would be a piece
of good clean dirty fun and which pretty much delivered. Oddly, its writers
(Ken Sanders, story; Barbara Kymlicka, script) and director (Doug Campbell)
were the same trio who created the outrageously bad recent Lifetime film The
Surrogate, and they even meant this to take
place in the same “universe”: the innocent young heroine whose boyfriend is
seduced away from her by his hot new teacher is seeking admission to
Whittendale University, the school where Jacob Kelly (Cameron Mathison) taught
literature and creative writing in The Surrogate; and when the villainess needs an alibi she concocts
one by buying a movie ticket to a film based on Blackberry Winter, the novel Jacob Kelly had written in The
Surrogate (only to be forced to take a
teaching job when he found himself blocked on his follow-up book). Dirty
Teacher is at least faintly more believable
than The Surrogate but it’s
pretty much cut from the same cloth. When high-school English teacher Mrs.
Cohen (Michelle Cuneo) steps down from her position in mid-term to go on
maternity leave — she’s greeted with a banner from her students announcing,
“It’s a girl!,” making one wonder how they found out the gender of her baby-to-be — she’s inexplicably replaced
by 40-year-old but still attractive-looking Molly Matson (Josie Davis). The
moment she shows up on campus Molly instantly gets the hots for one of her
students, Danny Campbell (the genuinely hot and hunky Cameron Deane Stewart),
who’s captain of the school baseball team as well as the son of a wealthy local
entrepreneur, Brad Campbell (Brett Stimely), which has pretty much promised him
a legacy admission to Stanford. One problem is that Danny already has a
girlfriend, Jamie Hall (Kelcie Stranahan), whom he’s been dating for almost a
year but who has, for the usual “moral” reasons, so far refused to have sex
with him.
Jamie’s parents are in financial straits because after 18 years at
Brad’s company, her father Steven (Marc Raducci) was laid off, and he’s
responded to this by drinking a lot and occasionally going by Brad’s home to
harangue him about the injustice of it all. In one of the film’s most genuinely
chilling — as opposed to insanely melodramatic — scenes, Jamie’s mom Lauren
(Darlene Vogel) sends her out to pick up dad, who’s over at the Campbells doing
one of his drunken rambles — and when Jamie arrives, she’s just in time to hear
Brad denounce Steven as a drunk and say, “Look at yourself! What company is
going to hire you?” “Don’t hurt
him more than you already have,” Jamie says, taking her father away in a deeply
sad inversion of the usual parent/child roles. Molly openly cruises Danny both
in and out of class, offering to meet him for “tutoring” after class and
slipping him both her phone number and, later, her address. She also sets up a
date for herself and Danny by deliberately giving Jamie a bad grade she doesn’t
deserve, then telling her she’ll upgrade her paper if she rewrites it that
night — and eventually Danny, with a bad case of blue balls from Jamie’s latest
turndown (at a party where he was sure she’d get drunk enough to say yes),
sneaks over to teacher’s house and they end up doing the down-’n’-dirty. (This
film marks a welcome return of the soft-core porn Lifetime used to do a lot
more of than they do now, and once again Cameron Deane Stewart is such a
gorgeous hunk of man-meat it’s a sheer joy to see as much of his naked bod as
we do!) In the meantime we’ve glimpsed flashback scenes to Molly’s own
childhood, sheer hell as she was being raised by a slatternly foster-mother
until she killed the woman, a diabetic, by sticking her with her own insulin
needle and then faking the scene to make it look like she killed herself on
purpose. The foster-mother from hell routinely called Molly “pathetic” and
“freak,” two words that serve as triggers for her psychopathic rages the way
that playing card did in The Manchurian Candidate, and when Danny asks to meet Molly in the park but
intends to tell her the affair is off, he uses the P-word and Molly responds by
getting in her car and running him over, killing him.
When she realizes what
she’s done, she determines to frame Jamie for the crime; she stashes her cell
phone in the glove compartment of Jamie’s car (how did she get the keys?) —
Jamie doesn’t have a cell phone because her financially strapped parents (her
mom is working two jobs to make up for the fact that her dad is working none)
couldn’t afford to keep paying her bills — and rubs Danny’s blood on Jamie’s
front bumper to set her up. The police duly arrest Jamie and her dad has to
borrow money from his brother to bail her out of jail — and even so Jamie is
put under house arrest and forced to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet
around her ankle. (She’s not allowed to attend school, but her mom is
authorized to pick up her course work so she can keep up at home.) Unable to
get any evidence against Molly — the one piece of physical evidence, Molly’s
own bumper with Danny’s blood on it, disappeared when she paid a chop-shop
owner $2,000 to replace it and get rid of it, no questions asked — Jamie
determines to go to Molly’s house and trick her into confessing, though Molly
catches the smartphone (presumably borrowed since Jamie doesn’t have one of her
own) on which Jamie is recording her and stomps on it (The Surrogate also contains a scene in which the villainess
crushes a cell phone under foot). Jamie’s plan is to keep Molly talking until
the police arrive — earlier her dad warned her that if she ever left the
grounds of their home the cops would come within 10 minutes — but the writers
and director have another surprise up their sleeves: the first detective who
shows up gets clubbed and knocked out by Molly, though Jamie is far-sighted
enough to grab the cop’s gun and threaten Molly with it. “You don’t know what
to do with a gun!” Molly says —
whereupon Jamie fires a warning shot in the air and attracts the other cops in
the neighborhood, who duly take Molly into custody. A tag scene shows that
Jamie has not only got an acceptance letter from Whittendale but also the
scholarship she needs to afford to attend (since mom dipped into her college
fund for the money to keep the house after dad lost his job), so all’s more or
less right with the world.
Dirty Teacher has quite a few things going for it — it’s nice, for once, to see a
sexually predatory teacher movie in which the teacher isn’t a more or less
innocent character either framed
as having an affair with a student when she really isn’t or led into a real one
by quirky circumstances that keep her a sympathetic character (as the real-life
Mary Kay LeTourneau was portrayed in the marvelous TV-movie about her, All-American
Girl), but someone who’s out to manipulate
and seduce her pet student from the moment she lays eyes on him. But the more
the writers tried to give the character some explanation for her
psychopathology, the harder it was to believe the story: the teacher comes in
looking less like an educator and more like a street hooker, and one wonders
what possessed the authorities at this high school to hire her in the first
place. At the end we find out she’d already been fired by a school district in
New York for having an affair with a student but was able to conceal that fact
from her new employers — which itself is pretty hard to believe (are we
supposed to think the American Federation of Teachers actively protects sexual
predators in the ranks the way the Roman Catholic and Boy Scout hierarchies
did?) — and there’s a weird little tag scene showing some men in jail watching
the news coverage of Molly’s conviction and bantering about how if there’d been
more teachers like her in their
school days, they never would have dropped out. Dirty Teacher is a movie done in by its own demented silliness —
though the silliness itself has some engaging entertainment value — and by the
exit of Danny about two-thirds of the way through, not only because we don’t
get to look at his bod again (except for a brief hallucination scene in which
he appears, all bruised and bloody, in Molly’s bed) but because we want to see
him alive, well and reunited with Jamie at the end, if only to reunite their
two families instead of treading awfully close to Romeo and Juliet territory (“Your dad fired my dad, but I love you
anyway”).
