by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 8 p.m. last night I turned on the TV and watched two Lifetime movies
in a row: a “premiere” of something called Homekilling Queen and a rerun of the one they showed last Sunday
(which I missed because I was watching episodes three and four of the CBS-TV
miniseries The Red Line instead)
called Psycho Stripper. The sheer
predictability of both the titles and the plots they accompany is beginning to
wear me down — I’m not sure how much longer I’ll want to watch Lifetime movies
even though they generate the highest click counts on my blogs of everything I
publish. In commenting on other movies on Lifetime I’ve written that they could
have been good, solid thrillers if their writers had just known when to stop —
when to quit larding plot complication on plot complication and reversal on
reversal until the whole story collapses under the weight of all the melodrama.
In Homekilling Queen the
over-the-topness is established from the get-go and achieves its own cheeky,
almost campy entertainment value. The gimmick in this one is that the 1-percent
teenager Whitney Manning (played by Kaitlyn Bernard in an almost perfect
delineation of her character’s basic conflict, torn between a sense of
entitlement and one of inadequacy) has a mother, Connie (Ashley Jones,
top-billed), and a grandmother, Evelyn Whitland (an absolutely chilling
performance by Jennifer Dale), who have carefully trained her to be utterly
unscrupulous in going after and getting what she wants.
Whitney isn’t just a
bitch, in other words; she’s a third-generation bitch, and we see her at her bitchiest in the
opening sequence, in which the principal of Chester Ridge High School (it’s in
West Chester, Pennsylvania — apparently, unlike the similarly named Westchester
in New York, the name is two words instead of one — though, as usual for
Lifetime, Canada is “playing” the U.S.) announces the names of the five
contenders for Homecoming Queen (“homecoming” is one of those bizarrely
long-lived high-school traditions I never really understood when I was in high
school myself and it hasn’t become any clearer to me since). The principal,
Wainsley (Nick Baillie), then offers his condolences that the previous year’s
student-body president unfortunately met with a tragic accident and died during
the summer break — and then, of course, we get a flashback that shows it was no
“accident”: Whitney sabotaged the inhaler the girl needed and, when she caught
up to her collapsed in a wood during a run, she dangled the inhaler in front of
her and refused to allow her to use it. I couldn’t help but think writers
Andrea Canning and Lynn Keller must have seen the 1941 film The
Little Foxes, in which Bette Davis murders her inconvenient husband by withholding his heart
medication and impassively descending a staircase as he expires on the upper
level because he doesn’t have his meds. It soon develops that Whitney’s chief
competitor for homecoming queen is Natasha Hart (Kayleigh Shikanai), who works
in a coffeehouse run by her mom Sarah (Krista Bridges) and has just returned to
school from rehab — she developed an addiction to prescription opioids but
wants to be seen as “clean” now.
Whitney determines to sabotage Natasha’s
campaign any way she can. First she downloads a rather sick-looking porn photo
from a Web site, then splices Natasha’s head on the porn model’s body and
creates a fake e-mail for Natasha’s friend Garrett Riley (Dakota Taylor — a boy
named Dakota?) to send this out to social media and make it look like Garrett
did it. Garrett manages to persuade Natasha that he didn’t send out the
embarrassing photo, and what’s more he agrees to run search software to find
the source of the image and figure out who did put it up. Whitney also uses her family’s money to
bribe other students into voting for her, and when Principal Wainsley starts an
investigation into whether that’s illegal and would get her disqualified from
the homecoming queen election, Whitney’s mom Connie first seduces the principal
and then invites him to a hotel room for a sexual joyride — which she secretly
video-records and sends the tape to Wainsley, saying that unless he gets
Whitney off the hook everyone,
including Mrs. Wainsley, will get to see the tape online. Eventually Whitney
realizes from Natasha’s Facebook page that Natasha’s big weakness is that she’s
a recovering drug addict, so if Whitney can get Natasha to use again — or even look like she’s using again even though she isn’t — she
can get her disqualified from the homecoming queen race and disgraced before
the entire school. To get the drugs she seeks out the high-school student who
was Natasha’s favorite dealer when she was still using, Jason Montrose (Mikael
Conde), and asks for a large quantity of oxycontin pills. Jason tells her —
using the two burner phones she has bought especially for the transaction — that
the price is $1,000, but when they arrange the meeting at which money and drugs
will be exchanged (always the big
sticking point in a drug deal) Jason tells her he’s raising it to $5,000, and
not even grandma has been willing to give Whitney that much for the project. So
she asks Jason to score her some fentanyl, fills up a syringe with it and
shoots him up with it, killing him in what’s easily the most chilling scene in
Alexandre Carrière’s surprisingly capable direction.
The cops who find his body
immediately assume what Whitney wants them to assume — long-time druggie Jason
accidentally overdosed — but Natasha corners a Black drug dealer who was one of
Jason’s suppliers and who said he’d never done fentanyl, and eventually the
cops realize he was murdered because the shot that killed him wasn’t in a vein.
Eventually Whitney gets busted, and the cops decide to re-investigate the
mysterious deaths of grandma Evelyn’s two husbands in a car crash — at first
she’d married an ordinary working-class guy, then she got rid of him by faking
an auto accident, got a job as secretary to a super-rich man, seduced him into
marrying her, and then offed him
in a faked car accident when she decided she wasn’t willing to wait for him to
croak au naturel to get her hands
on his money. By far the best part of Homekilling Queen is the home life of Whitney, her mom and her
grandma; about the only decent person in her family is her father Rob (James
Gallanders), who dumped Whitney’s mom Connie when she started getting too cruel
for him — and is now, in a coincidence that just adds to the hallucinatory
power of Canning’s and Keller’s script, dating Natasha’s mother Sara, who’s
been single ever since Sara’s dad walked out on them years before. (He’s also
the sexiest guy in the movie — though that may just be an indication that I
like them older — though Dakota Taylor as Garrett is considerably hotter than
the nondescript twinks we usually get in the Lifetime movie role of nice teen
boy the nice teen girl gets to know during the course of the movie.)
With the
powerful women who ran the two previous generations of her family
indoctrinating her into their win-at-any-cost cult (in some ways they’re a
female version of Donald Trump and his dad!), Whitney doesn’t have a chance, and as the cops close in on her
for Jason’s murder just as the homecoming queen election is about to take
place, she loses it so completely and so floridly one doubts she’ll be found
mentally competent to stand trial. I’m finding myself liking Homekilling
Queen better reminiscing about it than I
did while it was on — though it pushes the thin edge of total risibility even
more than most Lifetime movies, it scores as entertainment on its sheer
outrageousness, and the actresses playing Whitney, Connie and Evelyn do a great
job of portraying the family from hell. The jumble of consonants who plays
Natasha wisely doesn’t make her too
good — we’re rooting for her against the bitch (and it was an inspired touch on
the part of the writers to make anti-bullying Natasha’s big issue in the
homecoming queen election — itself a slap in the face against Whitney and the
way she’s alternately bribing and bullying her fellow students for votes) but
she’s also something of a self-righteous drip. She might have been a stronger
character if the writers had given us an intimation of why she got into drugs
in the first place (as Christine Conradt might have done with this story
premise), but even as it stands Homekilling Queen achieves a haunting quality the writers might not
have intended, and the whole idea of a family passing utter ruthlessness down
as an inheritance from generation to generation rings true, especially given who the current U.S. President is and how sure
he is that he is a superman to whom ordinary laws and norms don’t apply.
