by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was one of the silliest
things I’ve ever seen on this
problematic network: Killer Under the Bed, a product of the Johnson Entertainment Company (or is it the Johnson
Production Group? The film’s imdb.com page doesn’t list a producing company)
that’s given us the “Whittendale Universe” movies (though this one at least
isn’t set there — the school isn’t Whittendale but an equally pretentious,
status-conscious high school). The personnel behind the camera are ones that
have been associated with many of the Whittendale films — the producer and
co-writer is Ken Sanders, the other writer is J. Bryan Dick (though his initial
initial isn’t listed on the imdb.com page) and the director is Jeff Hare — and
the personnel in front of the camera are three nubile young women (they’re
supposed to be a mother and two daughter, but the actress playing the mother
looks young enough she seems more like an older sister). Mom is Dr. Sarah
Yeager (Kristy Swanson), a dentist who’s just unloaded her big-city practice
following the death of her husband a year earlier in a car accident. The
daughters are older sister Chrissy (Madison Lawler), a star lacrosse player who
blames herself for her dad’s death because his car crashed while he was racing
to get to one of her games; and younger sister Kilee (Brec Bassinger) — why
“Kilee”? Isn’t “Kylie” already a pretentious enough name without changing the
spelling to make it even more so? The opening sequence shows a fight to the
finish between a young girl, unrelated to any of the principals, and an unseen
assailant in a shed. We’re not going to be allowed to know how this relates to
the rest of the movie until nearly its end, and to our surprise after this
opening “hook” sequence ending, instead of flashing us back several days,
weeks, months or even years earlier, the chyron indicating the time shift
contains the message “One Year Later.”
One year later the three Yeager women have moved back to
the town where Sarah grew up and she’s joined the practice of her former
mentor, Dr. Abbott (Frederick Lawson), the sort of avuncular African-American
presence almost obligatory in these productions. Unfortunately Dr. Abbott’s
other assistant, Dr. Linda Ryder (Kristin Carey), takes an instant dislike to
Sarah and thinks she’s only returned to grab the practice when Dr. Abbott is
ready to retire and do her out of it. Meanwhile, as the new kid in school Kilee
is having her own problems: the school’s reigning student queen, Tina (Ashlee
Füss), approaches Kilee on her first day and tells her she’ll take a selfie of
the two together and spread it around the school — for a fee of $100. An aghast
Kilee refuses, and the next day Tina demands not money, but Kilee’s jacket — a
blue denim item with a patch reading “D. Yeager” that Kilee wears everywhere because it’s the only item of her father’s she still
has to remember him by. Kilee thinks she’s solved her problems when she finds a
voodoo baby doll in the shed in the house’s backyard and, when she goes online
to find what it is, she gets not a search-engine page but a page written in
blood-red letters on a black background telling her how to use the doll to get
back at her. Bitter with her sister Chrissy for having made fun of her and not
being supportive in her conflict with Tina, Kilee first applies a mild spell,
taking a piece of a red second-place ribbon Chrissy won and sticking it to the
doll’s leg with one of the six pins (ordinary pins with black knobs at the
blunt end) that came with it. Chrissy gets a cramp in her leg that immediately
goes away when Kilee removes the ribbon and pin. Kilee is immediately convinced
she can use the doll to get revenge on anyone who’s wronged or crossed her or
someone important to her, so her next step is to stick a bit of lipstick from a
towel Tina blotted with and stick it in the doll’s lips, with the result that
in the middle of a class Tina’s own lips start swelling in a hideous red
pattern that looks nothing like
something that could actually happen to a human being.
Meanwhile, Kilee has
been called out by her history teacher, Chris McCabe (Chris Prascus, an
absolutely gorgeous hunk of man-meat whom director Hare shows to great
advantage, first by putting him in white slacks that show off an enormous
basket, then by putting him in tight blue jeans that make him look even hotter
— to this old Gay guy the great glimpses of Prascus’ anatomy provided
entertainment value that the story, writing and direction otherwise lacked!). Kilee uses the doll to cast a spell on McCabe to get him to like her, but the
spell works too well and within an act or two he’s propositioning her and
ultimately attempting to rape her. (Coincidentally, or perhaps not so
coincidentally, I was watching this soon after I’d seen the 1996 movie The
Craft, which also features a high-school
girl who puts a spell on a guy hoping to get him to like her, but the spell
works too well and she has to fend him off to avoid him raping her.) Realizing
that the doll’s power is getting out of hand, she consults a book called
“Occult” which she finds on the shelves of the school library, but it doesn’t
have a library tag and therefore is clearly not a library book, and discovers that the voodoo baby
doll can be killed if it’s buried. Kilee does this, but the doll comes back to
life instead — we see its hand working free from the earth it’s buried in, a
sequence that might have been frightening if we hadn’t seen scenes like this in
innumerable horror films before — and it not only can move around on its own,
it can attack people at will. It stages an attack on Tina in her red sports
car, with a personalized license plate reading “DDYSGIRL” (i.e., Tina can get
away with extorting other students and pulling a lot of other nasty shit
because her father is a major donor to the school), and wounds her a lot with a
knife (what sort of knife we’re not sure because director Hare, stuck with a
special-effects budget typical of a Lifetime movie, can’t get us close enough
to the attack for us to see what’s really going on). The doll also drives Dr.
Linda Ryder (ya remember Dr. Linda Ryder?), Sarah Yeager’s professional rival, totally off the deep end: she
zaps Sarah with a taser, threatens to put her eyes out with a dentist’s drill,
and ultimately gets arrested and placed in a holding cell for people suspected
of mental illness.
Eventually Kilee catches on to what’s going on from a clue
inadvertently dropped by Tina, of all people, mentioning that the Yeagers are
living in “the old Mandy Dinkins house,” and she traces Mandy Dinkins, the
woman we saw being attacked in the opening scene (ya remember the opening
scene?), who was fighting the doll in the
shed until she managed to overpower it long enough to put it to sleep by
putting a noose around the head, hanging the doll and sticking the six magic
pins in it. Kilee traces Mandy to the asylum where she’s now incarcerated, and
Mandy tells her that the doll came to earth when she made a deal with Satan to
sell him one of his most vicious minions for the Biblically appropriate price
of 30 pieces of silver. Only the thing can’t be permanently killed — just
immobilized by the ritual of hanging it and sticking all six pins into it — and
this film’s climax takes place at the Yeager home, where they have to deal with
not only the doll itself but its ability to occupy and possess the body of any
living person — at one point it becomes Chrissy and suddenly this shallow
Valley Girl goes very, very bad.
They also have to deal with Chris McCabe, who came over to the Yeager home to
rape Kilee and grabbed her just as she had the doll-sized noose and pins in her
hand — so they have to deal with him to recover the noose and pins so they can
immobilize the doll, which they leave in the living room of the home as they
walk out the door, swearing never to live or even set foot in the house again.
Only, in the sort of open-ended evil-triumphs-after-all ending Lifetime has
become addicted to in recent years, a young woman with long dirty-blond hair,
whom we presume is Mandy Dinkins somehow having got out of the asylum, goes
into the house (did she still have the keys from when she lived there?), pulls
the doll from the ceiling where the Yeagers hung it and apparently is going to
set it free so it can go after her
enemies.
Killer Under the Bed is
one of those silly movies in which the writers posit the existence of a
supernatural being and expect to get us all to believe it — only the
contrivances they loose upon us to get us to do that are themselves so blatant
and obvious they’re more risible than frightening. There are a couple of
sequences of explicit violence that would make good horror scenes except that
we’re expected to believe the lethal assailant is an 18-inch doll that somehow
has the capability to overpower and murder a normal human. The acting doesn’t
help much; Brec Bassenger as Kilee way overpushes the “perky” stop (“perky” seems to be the default setting
for teenage Lifetime heroines — or villainesses, for that matter — the way
“winsome” was the default setting for ingénues during the silent-movie era),
and though Chris Prascus has one of the hottest-looking male bods I’ve seen on
TV in quite a long time (at least since Christopher Meloni quit Law
and Order: Special Victims Unit), he’s not
anywhere near a good enough actor to handle the transition from kind, gentle,
“sensitive” teacher to devil-possessed would-be rapist. It also doesn’t help
that the effects budget, such as it was, didn’t allow Madison Lawler to do more
than twitch her head when she was supposedly possessed — one really wanted her head to do the 360° turns on her neck the
way Linda Blair’s did in The Exorcist, a film that obviously influenced this one — or that the fundamental
concept was silly and the movie would have been a lot better if Dick, Sanders
and Hare had gone the Val Lewton route and made the whole “voodoo baby doll” schtick a dark fantasy cooked up by a young girl in the
shadow of just about everyone in her life: her mom, her (dead) dad, her sister and her schoolmates.
