by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 6 p.m. last night Lifetime re-ran a movie I’d missed on
its original go-round, The Other Mother
(this was around the same time — last April — they were also showing films
called The Wrong Mother and Killer
Mom), actually a better-than-average
thriller centered around four people: Jackie (Annie Wersching), her teenage
daughter Brooke (Kennedy Tucker), Jackie’s ex-husband (and Brooke’s father)
Mitch (Tyler Christopher), and Tiffany (Kimberley Crossman), the impossibly
perky blonde bimbo Mitch has just married. Mitch met her on a summer trip to
France on which he’d taken Brooke, who’s been majoring in French in high school
and wanted to spend the summer there to hone her linguistic skills and see the
fabled sights of Paris (when she mentioned having been on the Champs-Élysée I
couldn’t help but remember Red Buttons’ hilarious fracturing of the name in the
film Gay Purr-Ee: “Ah, the Champs
Ulysses?”) — only now she wants to drop French and take Spanish instead because
she wants to cruise Beau (Lou Wegner), the hot young man she’s got her sights
set on, and he’s in that class. This is just one of the flash points that arise
between Jackie and Brooke, who’s being pushed by Tiffany to be more independent
and stand up to her almost neurotically controlling mother (it’s clear
screenwriter Eric Martin wants us to admire Jackie and see her as a responsible
parent, but she’s way overdoing
it). It turns out the real reason
Jackie has become so domineering was that the year before Brooke had been
involved in an accident where she got drunk and got behind the wheel of a car
even though she didn’t know how to drive — and since then Jackie has run her
daughter’s life like a concentration-camp commandant and, among other things,
forbidden her from even thinking
about learning to drive. So Jackie is infuriated that Tiffany is ready not only
to give Brooke driving lessons but to present her with a red sports car as a
present once she gets her license. The Other Mother is yet another one of those Lifetime movies that
could have been really interesting and moving if its creators, writer Martin
and director Sean Olson, had known when to stop; if they’d just kept it a story
about a single mom and her teenage daughter and made the central conflict the
one between the responsible but over-controlling mother and the stepmom who
bops into their lives and seems willing to indulge the daughter’s every
rebellious wish, this could have been really good, but no-o-o-o-o.
They had to make Tiffany a total psycho — if
Christine Conradt had written this she probably would have called it The
Perfect Stepmother (a title imdb.com
doesn’t list, so it’s presumably available) — who latches on to middle-aged men
with money and teenage kids (the last time she did this she called herself
“Mary Smith” and got jealous of her husband Greg, played by John Littlefield,
over his continued attachment to his son, and ultimately she burned Greg’s
house down, killed his son and disappeared, to turn up again and latch onto
Mitch), marries them and then gets upset with them because they still feel more
committed to their kids than to her. “It’s always the little brats that get in
the way,” she says during the big confrontation between her, Jackie and Brooke
at the end in which Tiffany goes up against Brooke with a knife, intending to
stab her and eliminate the competition, only Jackie sneaks up behind her with a
tire iron and wallops her. Tiffany rallies long enough to club Mitch with a
frying pan, and later she stabs him, but fortunately the police arrive in time
to call an ambulance for Mitch and save his life (and the coda, “Five Months
Later,” indicates that Mitch and Jackie have reconciled and are back together
following his ordeal with the bimbo). However, Tiffany escapes, presumably to
replay the same scenario with another man and his child — why, one wonders,
doesn’t she just seek out a man who doesn’t have a kid already? After The Other Mother I watched about an hour of an even sillier Lifetime
movie, a “premiere” called Unwritten Obsession, a reversal of the crazy-stalker-fan trope in which
writer Skye Chaste (Haley Webb) has written a best-selling novel about a
character called Maya, only her publisher and her agent have rejected her
second book; at a book signing she meets Holly (Chelsea Lopez), an intense fan
and also an aspiring writer who wants advice from Skye on her own book, only
instead of doing the crazed-stalker-fan number director David Martin Porms and
writer Marcy Holland do the
desperate-writer-rips-off-the-manuscript-of-an-unknown-and-passes-it-off-as-hers
number. I turned this off in midstream because there was something on another
channel I was more interested in, which turned out to be a wise move.
