Sunday, May 26, 2019

Fatal Getaway (MarVista Entertainment, Sunshine Films Florida, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I watched two Lifetime movies on last night, a “premiere” of something called Fatal Getaway (the working title was Scare B&B, an obvious pun on the name of the airbnb Web site, which would have worked better than the one they went with, since I had thought it would be the story of an innocent young couple who ended up being taken hostage by an escaping criminal) and a repeat of a film called Psycho Grandma. Psycho Grandma was as silly as you’d expect from the title but Fatal Getaway, despite the misleading title — the “getaway” is actually a weekend four female friends plan to spend together at a beach rental in Biscayne Park (presumably in Florida, though that’s not specified in the script by James S. “Jamie” Brown) — turned out to be a quite good and tough thriller. The four friends are dark-haired Eliza Moore (Christie Burson) — the only one we ever get a last name for, and that not until the end — who’s just coming out of an abusive relationship with a man named Steve (we hear his voice in a message he left on her voicemail but never see him, which is probably just as well); two interchangeable white blondes named Bridgette (Karlee Edwards) and Vicki (Laura Ault) — one of these is an heiress from a super-rich family and one is a married woman with two kids — and the token African-American, Monica (Shein Mompremier), who I assumed was being set up for the role of the heroine’s Black best friend who learns the villain’s plans but is killed by the villain before she can warn the heroine.

The four are uniting for one last weekend together before the demands of families and jobs send them on their separate ways, and they decide to do that at a handsomely equipped villa owned by James (Tilky Jones, the drop-dead gorgeous Lifetime actor whose characters seem to be getting worse with each film). The villa is at an out-of-the-way location, and though it’s on the beach it’s far enough away from any cell-phone towers that the girls don’t get any reception there. The house is wired up to James’s computer system and it’s outfitted so that you can tell the house to do just about anything you want — open, close, lock or unlock doors; start your shower water and adjust its temperature; start music playing; and open James’s private Wi-Fi connection so you can still get on the Internet and communicate with the outside world even though there’s no regular cell service — with voice commands to its controlling computer. The moment we hear that we just know, based on previous Lifetime movies (can you say Tiny House of Terror?), that at some point, either by accident or because the villain is making them do that, the house control mechanisms will malfunction and one or the other of the tenants will be subjected to doors that won’t open and showers that are so hot they threaten to scald her to death.

What’s more annoying, they won’t have privacy: James is going to be staying with them during the entire duration of their stay at his home. This particularly annoys Eliza because she really wanted an all-women gathering since she’s just coming out of an abusive relationship and was hoping for a weekend entirely without men around, but she goes along with it and ultimately she’s the one who’s subjected to the locked bedroom door that won’t open and the shower that runs hot enough to scald her and won’t turn itself down when she tries to instruct it to. The girls also find that they’re being watched by a neighbor of James’s named Hector (Fedor Steer), who’s not only keeping an eye on them outside James’s house but also has the inside of the place bugged (albeit rather crudely with video cameras that produce only blurry black-and-white images) and is keeping an eye on the four girls and taking notes on them. At this point we hardened Lifetime-movie watchers could see three possible directions in which Jamie Brown and director Damián Romay could be taking us: 1) James is really a black-hearted villain and Hector is an undercover police officer trying to take him down before he completes his latest scheme; 2) James is really a nice guy we only think is a villain because Lifetime’s usual iconography is to cast nice-looking guys as black-hearted villains, and Hector the creepy stalker is the real bad guy; or 3) James and Hector are both evil, and whatever the plot is they’re in it together. The truth turns out to be #1, albeit with modifications — Hector isn’t an official police officer working undercover but a free-lance spy; and the official police officer in Biscayne Park, at least the one we see, is Officer Martin (Antoni Corone), and James has bought his loyalty through regular deliveries of bagels to the local police station.

Eliza, who’s clearly the smartest — or at least the least dumb — of the four, discovers a pendant with a quartz stone under the dresser in her bedroom and later recognizes it as the same pendant shown on the picture of Jennifer Garner (Anja Akstin) on a poster advertising her mysterious disappearance and asking anyone with information about her to come forward. James tells Eliza that Jennifer was a former vacation renter from Hector until she got antsy about him and moved into James’s place for the last day of her weekend getaway, but Hector hunts down Eliza and the member of the foursome she’s jogging with. Hector tells them he’s never done a vacation rental of his home, but he’s got suspicious of James and what happened not only to Jennifer but to four other girls who mysteriously disappeared right after they stayed with James. Eliza gets more suspicious of James when the quartz pendant mysteriously disappears from her room and turns up in James’s office, and about two-thirds of the way through the movie we finally learn what’s going on. It turns out James is a recruiting agent for a gang of human traffickers who kidnap American women and sell them to wealthy customers all over the world for use as sex slaves — though it was my understanding that most real-life human traffickers selling sex slaves look for women (or men) in their teens rather than the twenty-somethings shown in this film. We learn this when a mysterious man named Rio (Patrick Michael Buckley) calls James to inquire about the status of the four “assets” he currently has at the house, and for a while it’s an open question as to whether James is going to kidnap our decidedly non-fantastic four heroines and sell them as per plan or just kill them and write them off as a loss.

Brown’s screenplay has the big climax occur with about a half-hour of running time left to go and he has to work overtime to keep the film going long enough for Lifetime’s two-hour time slot, but he manages a quite spectacular exit for James: he’s in the house’s big swimming pool when Eliza, carrying a knife from his kitchen, dives into the pool and stabs him fatally. (Sunset Boulevard meets Psycho.) Officer Martin finally realizes what was going on and announces he’ll relaunch his investigation into Jennifer and the other missing girls to see if they can be recovered and rescued from their enslavers. Fatal Getaway suffers from the predictability of the Lifetime formula of late, but it’s also a crackling-tough thriller and director Romay shows himself quite adept at both Gothic atmosphere and suspense. It’s also capably acted, especially by Tilky Jones, who’s become quite adept at this superficially charming young man in a glorious bod (with a quite impressive tattoo on his left arm — I’ve seen this in his previous movies and I wonder if it’s real, not the henna makeup job I’d assumed before) with a black heart underneath (though the first time I saw him on Lifetime, in Open Marriage, he wasn’t a villain but the rather befuddled husband who goes along with his best friend’s invitation for him and his wife to explore the sexual underground). The women are more problematical because, except for Christie Burson (who’s quite good), they don’t have really well-defined characters to play: they’re just four damsels in distress whom we get to see a lot of in shorts and shirts open about halfway down, in one of Lifetime’s periodic attempts to get straight guys to watch their channel. Still, Fatal Getaway has enough variations on the usual Lifetime formulae, and is sufficiently well plotted and staged (and offers this old queen plenty of delectable look-sees at Tilky Jones’ hot bod, as unclad as they could get away with on basic cable!) to rank a cut or two above their normal output.