by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 8 p.m. last
night I switched on Lifetime for a movie that was not one of their “premieres” but turned out to be two years
old: Married to a Murderer (the title
is not only a bit of a “spoiler” but a misnomer as well, since the film’s
heroine is shown planning a wedding but doesn’t actually get married, to a
murderer or anyone else). It was disappointing after seeing the previous
night’s two Lifetime movies, a “premiere” of something called A Daughter’s
Deception and (before it) a rerun of the
“premiere” from two or three weeks ago, Mommy Group Murder. Married to a Murderer was even more disappointing because it was the work of
Nick Everhart, talented filmmaker who had both written and directed Mommy
Group Murder, and one would have expected
more from the man who had ably mixed Gothic horror into the usual Lifetime
formula in Mommy Group Murder. Alas,
Everhart, who was both co-writer (with John Doolan) and director of Married
to a Murderer (which has at least two
other titles, Splitting Image — the
main male characters are a pair of twins; the usual phrase for people who look
alike is “spitting image” but perhaps Everhart and Doolan were making a pun —
and I Married a Murderer), overdid the
horror this time and also filled his movie with weird Hitchcock allusions which
only underscored the vast gap in talent between Hitchcock and Everhart as
filmmakers. The central characters are Emma Kelly (Anna Hutchison) and twin
brothers Ted and Frank Taylor (played by actual twin brothers Austin and Aaron
Arnold — Austin plays Ted and Aaron plays Frank). In the opening scene, one of
those baldly cut-in prologues Lifetime is notorious for in which we see action
that is obviously going to be important but we have no idea who this person is
or why it’s going to be important, a
guy gets on a motorcycle and starts speeding on windy mountain roads until he
reaches a section where the road is out, tries to stop but can’t do so in time,
and the motorcycle spins out of control and falls to the ground with the man on
board.
It turns out the rider is Frank Taylor, he did his wild ride on a dare
while drunk, and while he survived he used his long stay in the hospital to
give up his alcohol and drug habits and rehabilitate himself. Meanwhile,
Frank’s twin brother Ted has become engaged to Emma Kelly, and while Frank is
living a hand-to-mouth existence Ted is well-to-do, has bought a big house on
top of the old one their mom was still living in when she mysteriously
disappeared, and Emma is marrying him as much for money as for love. To add to
the complications, the Taylors’ mom was something of a celebrity; she hosted a
cooking show on TV (Everhart and Doolan make her sound like a sort of
combination Martha Stewart and Julia Child) which Emma remembers watching with
her mom when she was a kid. In fact, her show was still getting fairly high
ratings when she disappeared. Most of the movie consists of Emma getting more
and more intimidated by the Taylors, who as Frank explains to her one afternoon
have always shared everything together,
including their homes. Each one has always had a key to the other’s abode, and
one day Frank uses his to let himself into the house Ted has bought for himself
and Emma. He enters while Emma is in the shower and skulks around her bathroom
while she’s doing that, making us think of Psycho even before composer Ryan Garrison copies the famous
violin shrieks with which Bernard Herrmann scored Anthony Perkins’ murder of
Janet Leigh in the shower in Psycho.
Emma notices Frank stalking her in her shower and tells him to wait downstairs
(the bathroom is on the second floor) while she gets dressed, and after she
does that Frank makes a pass at her and gives her the speech about he and Ted
have always shared everything,
naturally making her wonder if she’s part of the deal and she’s essentially
marrying both brothers. Later she and Ted make love on a big bed in their
bedroom, only there’s a fade to black and an abrupt cut, leading to a scene in
which she wakes up in the morning and we
see — though she’s still too tired to notice — that it was Frank, not Ted, who
was sharing the bed.
Nothing much happens throughout the film except that Emma
goes through a series of experiences with both brothers that leads her to
wonder whether Ted’s presumed fortune is really worth it, and at one point
Emma’s best friend Becca (Evalena Marie) enters the action because in addition
to being the maid of honor at the upcoming wedding (ya remember the wedding?) she also has the hots for Frank. The impression we get
is that she thinks both Taylor brothers are hot, and since Emma is marrying
Ted, Becca thinks she’s entitled to sloppy seconds. Only Becca gets herself
killed after she discovers a flash drive in Ted’s room safe, which Frank has
opened in search of it as well as some money, and when she screens it it’s film
of one of the Taylor brothers burying a corpse wrapped in black plastic in a
crudely dug grave in their garden. Frank sneaks up behind her and clubs her
from behind, and as she collapses and dies her glasses fall off her face and we
get a shot of them Everhart ripped off from the murder at the merry-go-round in
Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. And
his viewing of Hitchcock’s films extends beyond the established classics: the
moment we see a checkerboard-style pattern of tiles on the floor of the hallway
leading from the front door into mom’s home, we just know that at some point we’re going to see a dead body sprawled
out on those sorts of tiles the way Hitchcock did in one of his least known and
acknowledged films, Topaz (1969), in
which a Cuban secret service agent kills his mistress in what Hitchcock staged
to look like a love scene — she goes to embrace him and gets strangled instead
— the one creative moment in a dull and disappointing film that’s still worlds better than Married to a Murderer!
Given the title, we’re braced through much of the film
for a revelation that it’s really the presumably more stable brother Tim, not
flighty, crazy Frank, who’s the murderer — only it turns out [spoiler
alert!] they both are. Years before, Tim accidentally killed his mother by
pushing her down the stairs, and Frank covered for him by burying the body. Mom
fell down the stairs (just about all Hitchcock’s films feature long stairways
in them somewhere, so Everhart did
here, too) and sprawled out picturesquely over Those
Tiles the way anyone who’d seen Topaz would expect her to. Tim filmed the scene as digital video
and saved it both on his computer and on a flash drive so he’d have something
on Frank as well as Frank having something on him, only in an over-the-top
climax that occurs on the very day Tim and Emma are supposed to get married,
Tim becomes convinced Frank is going to report him and stabs Frank to keep that
from happening — only Frank manages to grab the knife and stabs Tim as well, and
as if that weren’t enough, as Frank is starting to expire he loses control of
the knife and Emma grabs it. Tim pleads
with her to go ahead with the wedding as if nothing untoward was happening and
ignore the fact that if she did she’d be — dare I say it? — married to a
murderer. Instead Emma stabs him too, and eventually both Taylor brothers end
up on that same patch of ornamental tile in their entrance-room hall their
mother expired on years earlier.
There’s a peculiar final scene in which all
the Taylor boys’ well-to-do relatives are hosting a party on the grounds at
which Emma is the guest of honor — and just when we’re wondering why they’d be
having a party in her honor when she never actually married into their family,
she pats her distended tummy and we realize she’s pregnant with one of the Taylor brothers’ baby. (We don’t know which one,
which only adds to the weird and kinky thrill of this film.) Married to a
Murderer might have been better if it had
actually been closer to what the title described — a woman marries a
superficially attractive man and gradually realizes he’s a killer — and if
Everhart and Doolan had made the Taylor boys more charming on the surface so
the revelation of what they really are
would have been more of a surprise (as it is, we keep rooting for Emma to bail
out of marrying into this preposterous family even before we learn just how evil they are!). After all, many of the best films about
serial killers, from the 1944 Edgar G. Ulmer Bluebeard (written by Pierre Gendron and starring John Carradine) to
The Silence of the Lambs, have scored
by making their central characters charming, witty, good-hearted and absolutely
wonderful except when they were actually killing people. The real
disappointment about Married to a Murderer is that it has me believing Nick Everhart wasn’t as good a filmmaker as
I thought he was when I saw Mommy Group Murder — or did he just get better in the intervening two years?
