by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I spent the evening watching a Lifetime movie I hadn’t seen
before called The Wrong Neighbor, a 2017
production from Hybrid LLC, scripted by Robert Dean Klein from a story by
co-producers Jeffrey Schenck and Peter Sullivan and more or less directed by
Sam Irvin. It’s pretty much a cut-to-pattern piece from the Lifetime atelier, though with a few novelties: instead of being a
“pussy in peril” movie, as Maureen Dowd once called the Lifetime oeuvre, it’s more of a “penis in peril” — said penis
belonging to Tim Sullivan (Steve Richard Harris), who’s tall, lanky and
considerably more attractive than most Lifetime good guys. The pussy his penis
(and the rest of him) is in peril from is a psycho bitch named Jamie (Ashlynn
Yennie), and the peril arises from the fact that Tim and his wife Heather
(Andrea Bogart — any relation? Probably not, since her imdb.com page describes
her as a South Carolina native, and there are bits of the Carolina twang in her
voice) have just separated. It seems that for the first 16 years of their
marriage (they have a daughter that age — Lisa, played by Cristine Prosperi —
and one gets the impression he knocked her up first and then married her) Tim
put his ambitions to be a great chef on the back burner and supported Heather
through law school until she became a hotshot tax attorney while he did the
house-husband number and raised Lisa. Then a friend named Nate (Dominic Leeder,
whose national origins are unknown but he has a definite accent from somewhere
in the British Commonwealth and I believe his character was supposed to be
Australian) offered Tim financial backing to open a first-class restaurant of
his own. (The set representing this establishment makes it look like a
mid-level diner, but hey, this is a Lifetime movie and whatever Lifetime was
paying the production company, Hybrid LLC, probably wouldn’t stretch for an
“A”-list restaurant set.)
The restaurant is about to open but the clash in
their schedules and particularly the fact that Heather isn’t used to Tim being
as wrapped up in his work as she is leads them to a separation after therapy
sessions with Dr. Fischer (the nicely authoritative British actress Julia
Farino), who’s apparently a marriage counselor and therefore can treat the
entire family without it being a conflict of interest (though Lisa has another
therapist as well, an American-accented male) aren’t able to hold the marriage
together. Heather gets to keep the house and Tim moves into an apartment
building — where Jamie, who already lives there, meets him (actually they meet
at a taco truck where Tim gallantly pays for her meal after Jamie realizes she
has no money on her because she left her wallet at home) and decides that he’ll
be the perfect person to give her the sense of family she lost when her parents
recently died of cancer while she was taking care of them. (Later, of course,
we learn that she was taking care
of an elderly couple, but they weren’t her parents and they didn’t die of
cancer … but I’m getting ahead of the story.) Lisa is a star on her high school’s
swim team — whose coach, Jaworski, is played by a middle-aged, homely-faced,
gravelly-voiced Michael Madsen, who probably has about 10 minutes of screen
time, tops, but is top-billed (presumably so audiences will think, as I did,
“Oh, good! Somebody’s in this movie I’ve actually heard of!”) even though when
he appears, I thought, “What sort of high school is this that hires Tom Waits
to coach their swim team?” She’s also got a hunky boyfriend named Steven (James
Gaisford), whose face isn’t particularly attractive but the rest of his bod is
so hot it doesn’t matter — and, blessedly, director Irwin gives us lots of
yummy shots of Gaisford naked above the waist and showing off a pair of pecs to
die for. (The male lead, Steve Richard Harris, also gets a lot of nice
shirtless shots and he’s no slouch in the pecs department, either, though he’s
hardly in Gaisford’s league.)
During an argument, Steven grabs Lisa’s wrist —
he lets go almost instantly but he’s left a bruise, and Jamie, who wants to be
a substitute mother to Lisa as well as a substitute wife for Tim, seizes on
this and decides that Steven is a psycho mate-beater Lisa better not see again
… or else. Jamie crashes the
opening of Tim’s restaurant (ya remember Tim’s restaurant?) and makes a scene with Heather and Lisa, resulting
in Nick throwing Jamie out and threatening to fire Tim from his dream job if
she ever shows up there again. Along the way Tim and Jamie went on an
alcohol-soaked date and the two went home with Tim seemingly determined to fuck
Jamie — but guilt and leftover commitment to his marriage led him to break off
their hot, half-naked necking session before his penis actually entered the
pussy from which it’s in peril … though Jamie shot smartphone photos of the two
of them together and is able to show them to Heather during their confrontation
outside the restaurant and convince Heather her husband really did cheat on
her. Later Heather realizes that Jamie is the source of all her problems, so
she asks a tax-law client of hers, Patrick (Jude B. Lanston) — a quite sexy
Black man (one blessed way The Wrong Neighbor differs from most Lifetime movies is it contains a
lot of hot guys, and they’re not
dastardly villains for a change!) — to investigate him. We’re not sure how
Patrick acquired investigative skills, but he obviously possesses them from
some mysterious job he “retired” from (but the writers don’t bother to tell us
what it was), and she starts stalking Jamie as Jamie keeps stalking Tim and
Heather (Jamie, reflecting the NSA-like capabilities of the current crop of
Lifetime villains, has both their abodes bugged and monitors them from her
laptop) — until Jamie unexpectedly ambushes him in his car and stabs him from
behind with what looks like a giant machete. He isn’t the first person she’s
killed during the course of this movie: earlier she ran down Lisa’s boyfriend
Steven (ya remember Lisa’s boyfriend Steven?) with her car when it looked like he and Lisa were
going to reconcile.
The film comes to a resolution — given all the dick jokes about
it I’ve been making, “head” wouldn’t be an appropriate word, and neither would
“climax” — after Lisa wins her school’s big swim meet, her parents show up to
cheer her on and decide then and there to reconcile, only Jamie manages to
kidnap both Tim and Lisa and take them to the home of the two people she used to
care for, only they weren’t her parents and they didn’t die of cancer — she
offed them and then grabbed their house (but then why was she living at the
apartment building Tim moved into) — and they see a family photo in which Jamie
has crudely pasted her own photo over Heather’s. (The fact that people in
Lifetime movies are still crudely gluing together composite photographs to
paste themselves into family situations involving the people they want to
replace seems weird to me. Haven’t any of their writers heard of Photoshop?)
They also see Jamie waving a gun around (earlier she’d shown herself a perfect
shot in a scene in which she was trying to teach Lisa how to be a markswoman;
it was also established that she knows the Israeli Krav Maga martial art) and
trying to decide which of her victims, Tim or Lisa, she should shoot first —
she’s planning to make it look like a murder-suicide while she escapes — only
Heather crashes the party and wrestles Jamie to the ground, Jamie loses control
of the gun, then Jamie pins Heather down and is about to strangle her when — surprise! — Lisa frees herself from the rather crude bondage
with which Jamie tied her to a chair, grabs the gun and shoots Jamie in the back
before Jamie can kill Heather. Alas, Lisa’s shot incapacitates Jamie but
doesn’t kill her; instead, Messrs. Schenck, Sullivan and Klein end the film
with a really preposterous tag in
which Jamie is admitted to the “Bloch Psychiatric Hospital” (one imdb.com
“Trivia” contributor suggested it was named after Robert Bloch, author of the
novel Psycho on which Alfred
Hitchcock and Joseph Stefano based the classic film) but manages to escape by
overpowering a rather dowdy blonde woman who’d just been hired as an orderly,
shoving her into a wheelchair and stealing her clothes so she can pose as a
staff member and just walk out of there — which she does, apparently courtesy
of a doctor who’s supposedly in charge of the place but seems never to look up
from his desk for any reason whatsoever.
Despite a few tweaks in the formula, The
Wrong Neighbor is Lifetime-cliché through
and through (there’s even an African-American schoolmate of Lisa’s for her to
confide in), and while other Lifetime movies with equally silly scripts have
been redeemed somewhat by directors with a real flair for Gothic atmosphere
and/or suspense editing, this one isn’t. Director Irwin gives the film the same
dorkiness in his direction the writers did in their script, and while he shows
off the physical beauty of his characters quite nicely (I’ve already told you
how aesthetically pleasing I found the many shirtless shots of Steve Richard
Harris and especially James Gaisford, and I’m sure straight guys watching this
would have the same reaction towards Ashlynn Yennie, especially in the
skin-tight mustard-yellow all-over she’s wearing in her opening scene!), he
doesn’t give this story any sense of atmosphere (except in the stock shots of
the big city where it’s supposedly taking place) or any real suspence. It’s
just another ho-hum day in the Lifetime salt mines, and one pities Ashlynn
Yennie, who might have been able to play her part more effectively if the
writers had gone easier on her and given us some Christine Conradt-esque scenes
that would have at least explained why this woman was so crazy instead of making us just accept it as a
given. If I have to watch one
more Lifetime movie with a scene in which a psycho character reacts to being
rejected by the person they have their demented crush on by sitting at their
car’s steering wheel, yelling, jerking their head around and banging things, I
think I shall have that same reaction myself!
