by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Lifetime was offering two “world premieres” last night, and
while I missed the first one I caught the second: Inspired to Kill, a genuinely surprising thriller from Michael
Feifer’s Feifer Worldwide production company. Feifer is credited only as
writer, but with no director credit on the film’s imdb.com page I’m presuming
he directed, too. The film takes place in Los Angeles and the central character
is Kara Reed (Karissa Lee Staples), who shows up in L.A. to take a
graduate-school writers’ workshop course at “Los Angeles University” (LAU), a
decidedly fictitious institution of higher education. She’s arranged to room
with Charlene “Charlie” Fratelli (Olivia d’Abo), who also co-owns a high-end
coffeehouse with her business partner Tony (Daniel Booko) and arranges for Kara
to have a job as a barista there. Early on we get a flashback to the effect
that the whole world of dating and boyfriends is traumatic for Kara because the
last man she was interested in, a publisher, was mysteriously murdered a year
earlier in New York, which was what induced her to move across country and
pursue her education in L.A. At the coffeehouse, Kara meets a cute co-worker,
Jason (Matthew Atkinson), who obviously has a crush on her but is too shy to pursue it (even when she lets him
take her home and even invites her in!), but one day at the coffeehouse she
finds a tablet computer left behind by another patron. Jason tells her to put
it in the coffeehouse’s lost-and-found drawer but Kara takes it home with her,
opening it to find a home page identifying it as the “Property of P. K. Reese.”
She gets a call on the tablet from Reese himself, who turns out to be crime
author Paul Reese (Antonio Sabato, Jr.), and she agrees to go out with him for
dinner. She also fends off the creepy advances of her writing professor, Cross
(Jay Stevens) — so three of the
male dramatis personae have the
hots for her, which seems a bit extreme: Karissa Lee Staples is attractive in a
perky sort of way but she’s not exactly drop-dead gorgeous. Cross calls Kara to
his office and says he wants her to “pick my brain” and thereby help her become
a better writer, but it’s all too obvious both to Kara and to us that what she
wants her to pick is a considerably lower part of his anatomy. He grabs her arm
but she manages to escape (“Just you wait!” I joked at this point. “I’m going
to be elected President and then I can have you deported!”), and she tells Paul
about the whole thing. Later, during one of his lectures, Professor Cross
suddenly goes into a seizure and dies.
Then Tony, Charlie’s co-owner and
on-site boss of the coffeehouse, fires Kara for missing so many shifts — and he ends up dead, victim of an assault that was part of
an apparent attempt to rob the place. Charlie gets killed, too, after she and
Kara have a jealous hissy-fit when Kara catches Charlie giving her friend Jason
a hug — just why that freaks out
Kara when she’s already hooked up with Paul and hasn’t shown any sign of
reciprocating Jason’s “that way” interest in her is a mystery, but it does.
Charlie throws Kara out of her place, making the acid comment that since she’s
landed Paul as a sugar daddy it’s not like Kara doesn’t have another place to
go. Meanwhile, the police, headed by Detective Fredericks (John Eric Bentley,
yet another of the avuncular African-American authority figures Lifetime
producers like to balance out the idiotic antics of their white characters),
naturally suspect Kara herself of the murders, since each of the victims had
hurt her in some way. (By this time a medical examiner has definitively
established that the supposedly “accidental” seizure that killed Professor
Cross was actually caused by poison.) Fredericks orders 24/7 surveillance on
Kara, and our presumption is that someone else in Kara’s life is killing all
the people who injure her in some way. We even get a scene between Kara and
Paul in which he boasts that he’s turning her into a better writer by killing
all her enemies for her, whereupon she tells him he’s crazy and dumps him for
Jason. (This was already something of a surprise since I had guessed based on
previous Michael Feifer scripts that Jason would turn out to be the killer and
Kara and Paul would take him down and end up together at the end — while
Charles, who came home when the film was about two-fifths into its running
time, had guessed Charlie would be the murderer on the Perry Mason principle that the most peripherally involved
character would be the killer.) Kara and Jason find an apartment together but
Kara asks him to drive back to Charlie’s place, where she slips in despite the
police crime-scene tape over the entrance. She says to Jason that she needs to
retrieve Paul’s tablet, which will prove that he and not she committed the
murders — but when she gets inside Charlie’s place [spoiler alert!] we get a flashback of Kara actually killing Charlie,
sneaking up behind her and stabbing her with a knife.
It turns out that what
Michael Feifer had in mind is an offbeat combination of A Beautiful
Mind and Psycho: “Paul” was a figment of Kara’s imagination all
along (something Jason eventually realizes when he looks at the tablet and sees
a video of Kara talking to herself in her “Paul” identity) and she had started
the cycle of killing everyone who got in her way when she discovered that Alan
Sheldon, the New York publisher she was dating a year earlier, was already
married, so she sneaked up behind him one night while he was outside and
slashed his throat. (Knives seem to be her preferred method, though she’s
adaptable enough to have poisoned Professor Cross and shot Tony with a gun.)
Jason calls 911 on her and fortunately the police arrive to keep him from
becoming Kara’s next victim, but there’s a tag scene showing Kara in a facility
for the criminally insane — it turns out that she was P. K. Reese (the initials stood for “Paula
Kara”) and had written successfully as a crime novelist until she went off the
rails and started killing for real. Charles rated this higher than most
Lifetime thrillers — the borrowings from Hitchcock especially impressed him,
and the minor plot glitches that he’d been picking up during the running time
were mostly explained as gaps and inconsistencies in Kara’s fantasy life. One
that Michael Feifer can’t get
away with that easily is the weird scene when Professor Cross gets poisoned and
starts collapsing in class; the students all start panicking and muttering
about having to go somewhere to call the police, and it seems that this is one
classroom in a 2016 university where no one is carrying a smartphone! I liked Inspired
to Kill — I’d have liked it even better
with more soft-core porn between Karissa Lee Staples and Antonio Sabato, Jr.
(and the fact that the cast includes at least minor-league film actors like
Sabato and Olivia d’Abo also indicates it had bigger ambitions than just being
another by-the-numbers Lifetime thriller), and maybe some between Staples and
cutie Matthew Atkinson as well (hey, I like guys who look like the human male in Scooby-Doo!) — but for once a Lifetime writer-director concocts
a “surprise” ending that’s genuinely surprising and still makes sense in
connection with what has gone before, and the acting is consistently good
throughout even though no one character really stands out from the rest.
