by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night, after watching the excellent “problem” Lifetime
movie Flint, I put on a recording I
happened to have from a 2015 broadcast of a previous Lifetime film, Stalked
by My Neighbor, which had eluded me twice —
it’s been on more recently but twice when I tried to watch it Charles was home and he asked me to turn
it off so we could run something else instead. I stumbled across the disc
containing it in my backlog of home DVD recordings and ran it, realizing it
would be an anticlimax after Flint.
It was, but it was also good clean dirty fun in the best Lifetime movie
tradition and a quite well-done suspense thriller. It starts in a condo in West
Hollywood, where Jodi Allen (Kelcie Stranahan) is indulging in her hobby of
photography. She’s taking photos from her window of just about everything that
goes on around her, only she’s interrupted by a knock on her door that turns
out to be a stranger who forces his way into her apartment and rapes her. Her
mother and only guardian, Andrea Allen (Amy Pietz, top-billed), decides to sell
the condo and move them into a suburban neighborhood where her daughter will
presumably be safer, only Jodi is sufficiently unnerved and suffering from what
would probably be diagnosable as post-traumatic stress disorder that just about
any noise from the outside sets
her off and makes her afraid someone is going to break in and assault her
again. Jodi starts photographing the neighbors, including a cute guy who lives
across the street; his name is Nick Thompkin (Grant Harvey) and both he and we
(the straight women and Gay men in the audience for this film, anyway) are
given quite a lot of choice look-sees of his naked chest as he bends over
various people’s cars. He tells people he’s just working on fixing his friends’
cars but it soon develops he’s really operating an unlicensed auto-repair
business out of his family’s garage — and he’s able to get away with that
because his mom is out of the picture (whether she and Nick’s dad divorced or
she died isn’t made clear by writer-director Doug Campbell) and his dad is on a
long-term assignment as a petroleum engineer in Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately,
he’s aroused the ire of local busybody Lisa Miller (Kelly Packard), who made a
ton of money in California real estate and, since she runs her business out of
her home, wants Nick to stop fixing other people’s cars in the neighborhood
because it’s making noise and therefore she can’t hear her clients when she
tries to talk to them on the phone.
Lisa is determined to close Nick’s
unofficial business and threatens to call the police on him, and soon enough
Lisa is bludgeoned to death in her bathtub by a mysterious intruder and Nick is
suspected because the two publicly argued and he had to close his business because of his interference.
Nick is hot-looking enough that by the usual Lifetime iconography that the
cutest guy in the film is always
the villain, we’re expecting him to be guilty (especially since earlier in the
film he stole Jodi’s camera, then returned it but not before downloading the
photos on her memory card to his own computer and threatening to blackmail her
with them if she ever did anything to cross him). But we soon learn that the
real culprits are Kristen Chambers (Katrina Norman), Lisa’s niece whom she took
in following the mysterious deaths of both her parents; and her boyfriend Ted Wilcox (Ethan Erickson), who’s older
than Nick but also considerably more muscular and butch, and hot enough he can fulfill the cute-guy-is-also-the-villain
Lifetime code. Kristen and Ted are after the $100,000 Lisa had saved from her
real-estate deals, and Ted did the dirty deed in exchange for half Lisa’s
estate — only Kristen decides, in the manner of the typical Lifetime
villainess, to double-cross Ted and kill him with his own gun, faking the scene
to look like suicide (after Ted had earlier faked the death of Lisa to look
like a slip-and-fall accident in the bathroom). What Kristen doesn’t know is
that Jodi sneaked into her house (for people in what is supposed to be a security-conscious
neighborhood, they sure leave their doors open a lot) after her mom tried to
ground her, brought her camera along and actually took a video of Kristen
killing Ted — then ran out of room on her SIM card and replaced it, only just
after she did that and tried to resume filming Kristen caught her, held her at
gunpoint with Ted’s gun, and forced her to drive to the woods where the two had
previously buried the murder weapon (then dug it up again and planted it in
Nick’s home to frame him), smash her own camera and dig her own grave.
Only mom
realizes that Jodi escaped, sees her drive off with Kristen in Ted’s car, and
is suspicious enough she gets in her own car and follows them. She calls the
police and says she thinks her daughter is being kidnapped, but is told to wait
until the car containing Jodi stops and she can report its location. But the
wooded area where Kristen has forced Jodi to drive is out of the service area
of mom’s phone, so she has to confront Kristen herself and ultimately does so,
subduing her with the shovel and somehow holding her until the police arrive —
though how the police got there
if there was no cell-phone service to the area remains a mystery locked in Doug
Campbell’s head. Still, despite some of the usual Lifetime plot holes, Stalked
by My Neighbor is actually one of their
better thrillers: Campbell has a genuine flair for suspense and Gothic
atmosphere, and he’s able to make a seemingly nice and cozy suburban area look
sinister. He also gets good work from his actors, Kelcie Stranahan in
particular; for once the actress playing the avenging-angel character in a
Lifetime movie is genuinely powerful and enigmatic, a bit of a busybody (at one
point the lead cop on the case, Detective Franklin — played by Dorien Wilson as
Lifetime’s usual avuncular African-American in an authority role — warns Jodi
that by taking pictures of people and their homes without their permission she’s breaking the law) but able to make the character’s
obsession and her turnaround on
Nick, from suspecting him of murder to falling in love with him, credible. Stalked
by My Neighbor is a better-than-average
Lifetime movie and I’m glad I finally caught up with it!
