by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Afterwards I got my Lifetime “fix” for the weekend after all
when I switched to that channel for Seduced by a Killer, a title similar enough to fare I’ve watched there
previously I checked both my hard drive and the moviemagg blog to see if I’d
written about it before. I hadn’t, though it seemed relatively familiar: written by Bo Joseph and
directed by Danny Buday for our old friends Cartel Pictures and Reel One
Entertainment, Seduced by a Killer
begins with a wordless sequence in which a college girl is being chased across
campus by an assailant wearing a hoodie. Most of the people she passes ignore
her cries for help, but two other people start screaming and this scares the
attacker away. Since there isn’t a chyron explaining the passage of time, we
don’t know whether this is a flash-forward to a scene of the killer’s seducee
running away from him lest she become his latest victim or a flashback prologue
(it turns out to be the latter, but we don’t learn what it was until about
three-quarters through the film); instead there’s a simple cut to the nice
suburban home of beauty salon owner Jessica (Clare Kramer) — for some reason
her establishment is called the Salon Lujon even though that isn’t her last
name — and her daughter Tessa (Mia Topalian), who’s just turned 18 and is
getting ready to go to the prestigious Vanderton University, also known as VIT
(an obvious not on Joseph’s part to the real Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, MIT) with her boyfriend Will Radford (the gorgeous young blond
Connor McRaith).
Alas, just as Will has asked Tessa to have sex with him on her
mom’s couch and she’s sent him away with the usual case of blue balls, an
assailant wearing a hoodie comes up behind him and murders him on Jessica’s and
Tessa’s front porch. (Jessica has been raising Tessa as a single mom and we
have no idea who her dad was or what happened to him, though we presume he’s
dead since if he were alive the writer would have re-introduced him later as
the daughter got in more and more peril.) Then we get a chyron reading “Six Months Later,” and six
months later Tessa has lost all interest in going to that prestigious school
and instead is moping around the house. Jessica urges her daughter to go online
and meet new people, only the new person she meets is a mystery man named Eric
(David Fumero) who’s twice her age and who claims to be a corporate CEO but is
really an employee of the public transit system who lives in a tumble-down
shack in the woods outside of town. The moment she sees them together, Jessica
is convinced Eric is a rotter — though at first all she thinks is he’s a
Humbert Humbert type cruising delectable nymphets half his age —but her
attempts to keep them apart naturally have the opposite effect. (I couldn’t
help but joke, “Memo to Jessica: do the names ‘Romeo’ and ‘Juliet’ mean
anything to you?”)
Of course, the police — in the person of an avuncular bald
Black detective who naturally is the most sensible character in the film —
originally do nothing, saying that since Tessa is of age there’s nothing
illegal about her dating a rather squirrelly guy twice her age — but eventually
Jessica, her boyfriend Dr. Christian (Ron Melendez, who despite his Latino last
name is tall, blond and looks like Connor McRaith’s older brother — are we
supposed to believe this is the only sort of man either mom or daughter is interested in?) and her friend
Nancy (Heather McComb), who works in Jessica’s salon even though she has a law
degree because her internship at a local law firm doesn’t pay anything, realize
that “Eric” is really Joseph, the man who attacked Jessica in her college days
in the scene we’ve already watched as a prologue but without understanding its
significance. For this Eric was arrested and incarcerated in a mental
institution for 18 years before he was finally released, and now he’s decided
to avenge himself against Jessica by killing Tessa, Nancy, Christian and
everyone else important in Jessica’s life, and also destroying her salon (which
he does by breaking in and smashing everything with a baseball bat) so she’ll
have no way to make a living and her life will be as ruined as his was by his
incarceration. Eventually Eric kidnaps Nancy — at first both we and Jessica
assume he’s killed her, but she’s ultimately found alive at the end — only
Jessica comes upon him as he’s tied up both Tessa and Christian and, with the
gun Nancy tried to give her but Jessica turned down earlier (Anton Chekhov,
call your plagiarism attorney!), she shoots Eric dead and saves both her
daughter and her boyfriend. Seduced by a Killer is typical Lifetime fare, nothing special but at
least delivering the goods, though cinematographer Brooks Ludwick’s idea of how
to create Gothic atmosphere is to make just about every nighttime interior glow
a burnished orange, and one wants to tell Jessica, “Your life will seem a
lot less scary if you take out all those
orange lightbulbs and put in normal white ones!”
