by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie was The Killer
Next Door, originally shot as Hello,
Neighbor (after the computer discussion
group that figures prominently in the action) and then called (and listed on
imdb.com as) Kill Thy Neighbor.
Though the director, Ben Meyerson, and the writers, Caron Tschampion
(“original” story, quotes definitely merited) and Brooke Purdy (script), are
names that are new to me, the production companies are Reel One Entertainment
and Cartel Pictures (both familiar Lifetime suppliers) and the multifarious
producers include some familiar Lifetime names. The film opens with Julie
Colton (Andrea Bogart, presumably no relation) being involved in an auto
accident when she’s in the last stages of pregnancy and her husband Matthew is
in the car with her. When she’s taken to the hospital and comes to after the
accident she’s told some good news and some bad news. The good news is that
she’s given birth to a healthy baby boy, whom she names Matty (Nicholas Borne);
the bad news is her husband was killed in the crash. The film flashes forward
several years and shows Julie moving to a community where her former
sister-in-law Alison (Hannah Barefoot — yes, that’s what the credits say her
name is!) has been living for years. Julie gets a job as a physical trainer
from a white-haired guy named Prescott, and starts dating one of her
co-workers, Blake (the genuinely attractive John-Michael Carlton). Julie hires
a nanny, Marisol Gracielas (played by blonde, blue-eyed Kenzie Dalton, who
despite the character’s name doesn’t look at all Latina — if I wanted to be
trendy, which I don’t, I’d use that horrible new euphemism “Latinx”), but her
main social contact is her former sister-in-law, who’s usually referred to as
“Ally.” Julie runs afoul of the Gestapo-like membership of the Hello, Neighbor
bulletin board, who turns her life into an odd cross between Kafka’s The
Trial and Golding’s Lord of the
Flies: every move she makes, especially as a single parent, is
scrutinized and viciously criticized by the groupthink of Hello, Neighbor and
the iron rule of its dictatorial sysop, older woman Katherine (a marvelously
controlled performance by Joanne Baron), to the point that Julie starts
worrying that eventually her enemies in town will sue to have Matty taken away
from her.
At one point Julie reports that Matty has gone missing — and evokes
the sympathy from the Hello, Neighbor listers she’s been looking for all along
— until Ally drives up with Matty
in her SUV: it seems they had a playdate in which Ally was going to take Matty
to the local amusement park, and Julie forgot about it or had the wrong date.
Then the vindictive bitches on Hello, Neighbor send a fresh blast of angry
messages attacking Julie for wasting their time in getting them to search for a
“missing” kid who wasn’t really missing at all. Meanwhile a mysterious figure
in a light green hoodie is skulking around the neighborhood at night, stalking
Julie and killing people who try to help her, always by sneaking up behind them
and clubbing them to death with a tire iron. Among the people who gets this
“treatment” are a security guard on the premises who caught the hooded figure
taking pictures of Julie and Matty, and — later on — Marisol, the nanny and the
only person besides Ally whom Julie thinks she can trust. For a while it’s not
clear what set of Lifetime’s
clichés they’re going for here — the heroine’s hot, hunky boyfriend who turns
out to be her stalker and would-be killer; the heroine’s neighbors, who can’t
stand her and suspect her of some dastardly deed; or the heroine’s best friend,
who’s all smiles and light on the surface but underneath is hatching some plot
to wreak her revenge against Our Heroine for some real or imagined injury or
slight. It turns out to be the last of those three: Alison Colton is not only
Julie’s late husband Matthew’s sister but his fraternal twin (something we’re
not told until Hannah Barefoot’s big mad scene at the end), and she’s convinced
that her brother has been reincarnated as her nephew and therefore she has to
destroy Julie’s life and, if possible, either get her arrested or locked in an
asylum so she can get custody of Matty. Needless to say, it’s Alison — not the
male we would have originally assumed — who was the figure in the light green
hoodie and blue jeans who clubbed the complex’s security guard from behind with
a tire iron in an early scene (one would think even Paul Blart, Mall Cop
wouldn’t have let his guard down quite this blatantly, especially when he’s
been called and told to be looking
for an intruder who’d just been seen breaking into Julie’s house!) and clubbed
Julie’s nanny Marisol later on with the so-called “welcome rock” presented to
any newbie who moves into this absurdly clubby neighborhood. (One gets the
feeling sometimes that it’s less that Julie’s moved into a new community and
more like she’s pledged a sorority.)
When Alison kills Marisol director
Meyerson has her doff the hood of her jacket long enough to “out” her, at least
to the audience, as the killer. Later, though, there’s still another scene in
which the figure keeps the hood on, so we wonder whether there were two people in green hoodies tormenting Our Heroine — indeed, in line with
Lifetime’s iconography of Hot Guy =
Villain, I was briefly wondering whether Ally and Julie’s boyfriend
Blake were in on the plot together. Instead Ally knee-caps Blake and puts him
out of commission for the rest of the movie — he’s laid up, first in the
hospital and then in the rehab center where he and Julie both work. (My suspicions
towards Blake were aroused when at one point he offered to take Julie and Matty
to his deserted cabin in the mountains. On Lifetime, deserted cabins in the
mountains are almost always isolated places the bad guys take the good guys —
or the good guys’ kids, whom they’ve kidnapped — so the final denouement can
take place where there’s no cell-phone coverage and therefore the good guys
can’t call for help.) Instead Blake gets wounded and Ally offers to take Matty
“camping” by pitching a tent on her front yard where she and Matty can sleep
together — she’s already trying to condition Matty to call her, not Julie, “Mommy” — and when Julie asks to be
included Ally says there isn’t room in the tent for her but she can sleep in
Ally’s own bed. Julie discovers Marisol’s cell phone, which Ally kept after she
killed her, in Ally’s bedroom and finally realizes Ally is the mastermind of the plot against her. There’s a
final confrontation in which Ally threatens Julie with a gun and cuts her own
arm with a piece of broken glass — the idea is she’s going to kill Julie and
then claim that Julie attacked her with a knife and Ally shot her in
self-defense — and with the cops, in the person of an aging time-server named
Officer Ramsey (Cris D’Annunzio), already suspicious of Julie’s sanity, she
figures they’ll believe it. Only Julie has discovered an old toy of Matty’s
which Ally first stole, then returned, but bugged with a camera that recorded
everything that went on in Matty’s bedroom and broadcast it to Ally’s cell
phone.
Ally gets a mad scene so florid you expect Maria Callas or Joan
Sutherland to be singing it to Donizetti’s music — a quite dramatic contrast
both from her personality as previously depicted and the understated
psycho-next-door performances that have been the recent standard for Lifetime
villains — in which she confesses, among other things, that she killed off one
of the women who worked at Dr. Prescott’s physical therapy clinic to open the
slot for Julie so she’d move there and be within Ally’s clutches; she also
confesses to murdering the guard and Marisol and knee-capping Blake. When Julie
calls the cops Ally is convinced they’ll take her side — until Julie hands
Ramsey the bugged toy, which she’s used to record Ally’s confession.
Fortunately writers Tschampion and Purdy spare us the tag scene that’s become
all too familiar in Lifetime movles lately — the crazy woman in a mental
hospital still nursing her grudge
against the heroine and biding her time until she can escape and have her
revenge at last. Instead we get a three-shot with Julie, Matty and Blake, up
and around again and eager to talk Julie into getting together with him
formally so they can give Matty a little brother or sister. Right after The
Killer Next Door Lifetime showed a rerun of
an earlier movie called The Killer Downstairs, which I reviewed as a bit better than the Lifetime
norm: The Killer Next Door a.k.a.
Hello, Neighbor a.k.a. Kill
Thy Neighbor is very much to the Lifetime norm (despite such deviations from the
usual formula as not having the
hot, sexy guy turn out to be a villain!), decently acted (though Hannah
Barefoot can’t quite integrate her big mad scene at the end with the controlled
performance she’s given up to then) and capably directed, even though lacking
the bits of Gothic horror with which other Lifetime directors have adorned
their films.
