by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched Lifetime’s latest “premiere,” The
Killer Downstairs, which turned out to be a
quite haunting movie even though it’s also pretty much to the typical Lifetime
formula, which Maureen Dowd called “pussies in peril.” Alison Peters (Cindy
Busby) is a former attorney who suddenly lost her job at a big law firm for
reasons that remain mysterious until about halfway through the film, when she
confesses that she quit after she had an affair with a male colleague which
blew up in her face. Now she’s reduced to working as a clerk at a big
supermarket called Big Box Outlet (ironically the real store Big Lots was running its commercials during the program) and looking for a
source of income to maintain the house that’s been in her family for three
generations. Accordingly she advertises on a Web site called “MiCasaSuCasa”
(which she and the other actors in the film insist on pronouncing without the
slightest hint that the name is actually Spanish) to rent out her basement
suite. She accepts the offer of James Brewer (Marcus Rosner), who shows up and
is so drop-dead gorgeous we know at once that he’s going to turn out to be a
no-holds-barred villain — though this film departs somewhat from the Lifetime
norm in that there are actually three reasonably attractive men in the cast, though two of them end up
sleeping the Big Sleep well before it’s over. It also departs in that Alison
(who’s unattractively nicknamed “Ally” through much of the film) is not raising a child as a single mom — she’s genuinely
alone in that big house, though she does have friends. One is Sarah Williams
(Donna Benedicto), a racially ambiguous woman who’s known Alison since they
were third-graders and who helped her get the job at Big Box because she was
already working there as an assistant manager.
Alas, the manager she’s
assisting is Brandon Matthews (Ben Wilkinson), who’s notorious around the store
for hitting on all the attractive young women who work there. Sarah warns Alison
that Brandon is going to try to get into her pants, and indeed he does — though
the first person who sexually harasses Alison is a customer, a heavy-set schlub who’s sitting on one of the couches for sale in the
store. He says he’s trying it out and asks Alison to try it out with him, and
just then Brandon comes on the scene and plays white knight, telling the
customer to get lost. Of course, he promptly makes his move on Alison — when
she blurts out that she used to be an attorney, he says he has a “legal
problem” and he’ll treat her to dinner (at a restaurant unattractively but
appropriately named the Fat Crab) that night and pay her $150 for her advice.
When Alison shows up for the date it turns out the “advice” is on how Brandon
can fire Sarah, who’s got on his shit list for turning him down, and it’s clear
Brandon wants to install her in Sarah’s old job and expects sexual services as
part of his reward for promoting her. Alison stalks out — and James Brewer
happens to be on the scene outside the restaurant as she leaves it. (One of the
odd things is that Ben Wilkinson is actually an attractive man, though the
filmmakers try to make him look repulsive by slicking down his hair, combing it
unattractively and dressing him in tacky khaki store pants — though his basket
still shows through quite nicely and suggests there’d be plenty of women he
could have sex with without
having to hire them for the store and then threaten to fire them if they don’t
“put out.”) James decides he wants Alison himself, and to get her he’s going to
eliminate any potential rivals — starting with Brandon, whom he overpowers at a
subsequent meeting at the same restaurant (he’s used an old phone to send him a
text, saying it’s from Alison, apologizing and offering to meet “her” again),
ties up, throws into a dumpster, pours in lighter fluid and sets Brandon on
fire.
The body is discovered the next day and the cops assigned to the case,
Fitzgerald (Josh Byer) and Reynolds (Alyson Araya), initially assume Alison is
the killer because the text that lured Brandon to the kill site supposedly came
from her. When she shows the cops her own phone and they can see that the
number is not the same, she then inadvertently rats out Michael Hammond (Emy
Aneke), a tall, striking-looking African-American who was a classmate of
Alison’s at law school, who works at the law firm owned by Cameron Crowder
(Adrian Formosa) and says that he can arrange for Alison to get an interview
there. Worried that Alison will score not only the job but also Michael’s ultra-hot
bod — director Tony Dean Smith (who also co-wrote the script with Adam Hussein)
shows him casting enough burning looks in her direction to start a California
wildfire — James determines to kill him, too. He strangles him and then puts
Michael’s body over his own shoulder, then digs a grave for it ridiculously
quickly — only Michael isn’t quite dead: he comes to and tries to fight back
before Michael finally conks him out again with his shovel, then buries him
alive, explaining that he’ll have eight minutes before he finally suffocates.
So in this version of a Lifetime script it’s a Black man, not a Black woman, who catches on to the villain’s
plans but is killed by him before he can tell the heroine — as for Sarah, whom
we’ve thought was being set up for this role, she’s actually alive and well at
the fadeout. Sarah does discover
one of James’s secrets — he claims to have had a wife and daughter who left
him, but she does an “image search” and finds that the “wife” and “daughter”
were actually a stock photo James downloaded and spliced himself into with
Photoshop. She tries to tell Alison — who’s also been warned by James’s former
sister-in-law that “he’s not who you think he is” (apparently the wife was real
but James dispatched her in the backstory, along with six other women he’s
attracted and then killed) — but Alison, just after she’s had a hot sexual
experience with James, doesn’t get Sarah’s message in time and James is able to
overpower her (he shared a dinner with Alison and Sarah and drugged Sarah’s
wine), tie her up, throw her in Alison’s closet and seal her mouth with duct
tape.
The climax occurs when James does one of his lightning-fact D.I.Y.
gravedigging jobs in Alison’s backyard — apparently premature burial is his
favorite form of murder — only as soon as James is about to throw Alison in the
grave and start shoveling dirt on her, Alison grabs the shovel away from him,
knocks him out, throws him into
the grave and is about to start burying him when … director Smith does a sudden cut here and the
next thing we see is Alison greeting the rescued Sarah and watching as the cops
take James away, a rare (though not unheard-of) instance in which a Lifetime
villain is actually taken alive instead of killed. Though the plot is full of
the usual Lifetime sillinesses, The Killer Downstairs is actually one of their better efforts; even though
the setting is a typical upper-middle-class suburban home, Smith gets a lot of
Gothic effects into the story and he draws a particularly subtle, haunting
performance out of Marcus Rosner as the bad guy. He lets Rosner play his role
charmingly enough to help us understand why Alison is so attracted to him and so reluctant to
believe he’s really a standard-issue Lifetime crazy psycho killer. Indeed, the
entire cast is quite understated, avoiding the eye-rolling and scenery-chewing
all too typical of Lifetime movies, and The Killer Downstairs overall is satisfying entertainment, nothing great
but at least a cut or so above the general Lifetime norm.
