by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I switched to the Lifetime
channel and stayed there for four hours watching a couple of movies, both dated
2017 even though neither was billed as a “premiere.” The first one was Girlfriend
Killer, which was written by
Christine Conradt but a disappointment coming from her because she utterly
failed to bring any sort of multidimensionality to her villain (the usual
aspect that raises Conradt’s scripts above the Lifetime norm). The real auteur of this one is neither Conradt nor the traffic cop
— oops, I mean director — Alyn Darnay, but Barbie Castro, who not only starred
as the usual Lifetime damsel in distress but co-produced the film with Eric R.
Castro (presumably her husband) and cast her daughter Taylor Castro as her
character’s daughter in the movie (well, that’s one way to avoid the bugbear of
having two people in a movie who don’t look at all alike passed off as genetic
relatives: cast a real mother
and daughter as the mother and daughter in the film) and also hired one Rhys
Castro as the propmaker — there are more Castros in this movie than there ever
were in the Cuban government! Barbie Castro has done at least three “_____
Killer” series films for Lifetime before, Assumed Killer, Patient Killer and Boyfriend Killer, though Boyfriend Killer is the only one I can recall seeing before. It was
also written by Christine Conradt and directed by Alyn Darnay, but I said of it
that “this time [Conradt] seems merely to be following her formulae instead of
legitimately extending them the way she did in The Bride He Bought Online,” and the same could be said of Girlfriend
Killer as well. Girlfriend
Killer does have its points,
including the off-beat profession Conradt thought up for her heroine, the
Barbie Castro role. She’s a divorcée named Carmen Ruiz (I got the last name off
imdb.com and don’t recall hearing it mentioned in the film) with a teenage
daughter named Ayla (Taylor Castro) and a boyfriend named Ryan Gerner (Brian
Gross — not exactly a hunk to die for but a nice-looking piece of man-meat with
great pecs).
Carmen has created a business for herself that is a combination
consultant and videographer for men seeking to make marriage proposals to their
significant others (and not just women: one of the most delightful scenes in
the film is one in which Carmen stages the proposal of a Gay man to his partner! I guess it’s progress of a sort that we
at last exist on Lifetime). She stages the date on which the guy will pop the
question and uses a hidden camera and either a shotgun mike or mikes concealed
in flowerpots and bushes (just like in the early days of sound film in the late
1920’s!) to record the proposals, then presents the lucky man with an Internet
link to download the video and collects her fee, while Ryan helps her as an
editor and a grip. Only one of her customers, Emerson Banes (Jason Cook, who
for once is not the hottest guy in the
movie even though he’s the villain — both Ryan and Carmen’s ex Nick, played by
Khotan Fernandez, are sexier!), isn’t as lucky as the service advertises: he
makes his proposal in Carmen’s elaborate staging, but his girlfriend Marissa
Stefans (Elisabetta Fantone) turns him down, saying that she’s been seeing
someone else for four months, he’s someone Emerson doesn’t know that she met at
a “trade show,” and they hit it off better than she and Emerson ever have.
Emerson is your typical spoiled Lifetime 1-percenter; he drives a red Maserati
sports car that practically becomes a character itself and his response to
Marissa’s turn-down is to knock her off. Before Marissa mysteriously disappears
— she’s missing for several days before her body is found — Ryan gets an odd
phone call which he tells Carmen is from his brother Jason but is really from a
woman, which made me think for a bit that Christine Conradt was going to have
Ryan be the man Marissa was seeing behind both Emerson’s and Carmen’s backs.
But that little pink herring (it really isn’t well-developed enough to be
considered red) gets dropped in a hurry and the rest of it is a typical tale of
Obsessed Psycho 101 stalking Carmen — she tried to console him after his
proposal got turned down and he instead concluded that it was Carmen who was
meant to be a soulmate.
It turns out he not only broke into Carmen’s home and
stole all her video footage,
including his own failed proposal, which he runs over and over again in his
private projection rom, he even has plastered a whole wall of his house with
photos of her — how 20th century; today the obsessed man would
instead have a computer file of photos of his crush object and relentlessly
scroll through them instead of posting them on his wall — and he’s determined
to get her by any means necessary, including running down Ryan with that hot
red car (Ryan emerges relatively unscathed but for a while Emerson thinks he’s
killed him). Meanwhile Carmen’s daughter Ayla has been on a camping trip in the
woods with her dad Nick, whom she likes, and Nick’s fiancée Zoe Kent (Vivi
Pineda), whom Ayla can’t stand — only she runs away from camp and makes it back
to Carmen’s home, where Emerson kidnaps her (as I’ve noted in these pages
before, it’s virtually obligatory for a Lifetime movie in which the heroine in
distress has a child for said child to
be kidnapped as a set-up for the final sequence) and holds her, telling Carmen
to charter him a boat and allow him to escape to the Bahamas, otherwise he’ll
kill Ayla. At first Carmen doesn’t want to involve the police for fear Emerson
will kill Ayla if she does, but Ryan talks her into it and the “boat” she offers
Emerson is a set-up — its crew members are undercover police officers — and of
course the film ends with Ayla recovered safely and Emerson arrested (though it
is something of a variation
on the usual Lifetime formula to have the principal villain captured alive
instead of killed). Girlfriend Killer is a pretty typical Lifetime movie, neither especially good nor
especially bad, decently done and with some nice-looking male cast members who
for once aren’t playing villains, but a
bit of a disappointment from Christine Conradt because one thinks that, given
her head instead of locked inside a Castro family vanity production, she could
have made Emerson a genuinely interesting and multidimensional villain
character instead of just a “stick” psycho.
