by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Alas, the movie Lifetime showed right after Fatal
Getaway, Psycho Granny, is a terrible film
that fully lives up to the ridiculousness of its title! The film opens with a
grim scene in which grandmother Colleen Barton (Robin Riker) holds court at a
dinner table with a family of four she’s just poisoned. Though they’re either
dead or unconscious and well on their way to being dead, she insists on
addressing them and cataloguing everything she thinks is wrong with them that
made her feel forced to kill them. At first we wonder whether writer David Ian
McKendry (whose wife of 16 years, Rebekah McKendry, directed this film — and
I’m sorry to say this movie is not
going to give any boost to the cause of women directors; Christine Conradt or
Vanessa Parise she is not)
intends this as a climactic scene in the story and the rest of the film will be
a flashback as to how we got here, but no-o-o-o-o; the next thing we see is Colleen pasting computer
print-outs of articles about this and other mysterious murders or presumably
“accidental” deaths into a scrapbook, so we can assume she’s looking for her
next pigeon. Her next pigeon duly arrives in the form of Samantha Kirkpatrick
(Brooke Newton), tall, blonde, leggy and even dumber and more naïve than your
common run of Lifetime heroines, whom Colleen runs into accidentally/on purpose
at the funeral home run by Mrs. Wicker (Caroline Williams).
Samantha is there
because her mother has just died in an apparent accident (though as the film
progresses we get the impression Colleen killed her to set up their meeting),
and Colleen shows up in mourning for the same purpose. Though Samantha was her
mom’s biological child, her mom was raised by an adoptive family and Colleen is
claiming to be the biological mother of Samantha’s mom. Samantha is totally
convinced that Colleen is indeed her long-lost grandmother despite the doubts
of her husband Brad (Matthew Lawrence, who’s reasonably easy on the eyes and
much hotter than the tall, lanky, sandy-haired bores Lifetime usually casts as
the husband, but not so
attractive we don’t start suspecting him of wrongdoing given the usual Lifetime iconography that Sexy Guy =
Black-Hearted Villain). Unfortunately, the McKendrys have left so many loose
ends in their story it feels like a Calder mobile, most notably the sheer ease
with which Colleen kills just about everyone who comes between her and Samantha
with a cheery lack of concern as to what she’s going to do with their bodies.
She kills Brad’s business partner Todd (Jacob Young) on the doorstep of the
Kirkpatricks’ home without either Samantha or Brad even suspecting that a murder has been committed on their front
porch. She later takes out Samantha’s best friend Aimee (Mary O’Neil) by first
clubbing her with a tea kettle and then strangling her with a pull cord used to
open her garage door (this macabre murder, with plenty of extreme close-ups of
the greenish-yellow tennis ball used on the cord as a handle to open the garage
door as Aimee expires, is actually Rebekah’s best piece of direction in the
film), though once again we don’t get even a hint of how she disposed of the body. Fortunately, before
Colleen killed her Aimee asked her friend Jill (Makeda Deklet), who luckily
gets to play the African-American who discovers the villain’s plot but does not get killed by her before she can alert Our Heroine
(obviously the McKendrys split
this usual Lifetime character into two, the white woman who’s offed by the villainess before she can
warn the heroine and the Black woman who got the information against her).
Jill
works in some capacity for law enforcement and/or adoptive services that gives
her access to national databases, and she finds out that “Colleen Barton” has
had a number of aliases and a long record of run-ins with the police, including
one from back in 1983 in which she was on vacation with her then-husband
Michael, who mysteriously disappeared on a vacation to the Grand Canyon just
before Colleen was about to give birth to their baby. (One has visions of
Colleen and Michael re-enacting the famous scene from Auntie Mame in which Mame’s husband falls to his death in a
canyon just as he’s trying to take a picture of her.) Samantha finally realizes what she’s up against when she steals the
photo of the young Colleen at the Grand Canyon that’s among the many hung on
the walls of her home, takes it out of its frame and sees that it’s been folded
back to conceal Michael, who was originally in the image (but then, in the
pre-selfie age of 1983, who took it?). She also realizes Colleen is crazy when
she visits Colleen at home and finds she’s already outfitted a room in her
house as a nursery for Colleen’s baby-to-be — which Colleen hopes will be a
girl so she and Samantha can raise her without any men around. (Never
Give a Sucker an Even Break meets Forbidden
Planet meets a Lesbian separatist’s wet
dream.) Samantha finally realizes that Colleen isn’t her grandmother, but she gets the information from
Jill (ya remember Jill?) and uses
it to trace the real baby Colleen gave birth to after killing the father and
put up for adoption, a divorce attorney named Melanie (Austin Highsmith) who
blows her off on the ground that she doesn’t give a damn about her birth
mother; as far as she’s concerned her real mother is the one who adopted her and raised her, and the fact that
she didn’t come out of her womb is immaterial. (I’ve interviewed adoptees and
read accounts of them that take wildly different points of view over whether
they ever want to seek out their birth parents and what might happen to them
psychologically if they found them.)
Eventually Colleen kidnaps Brad and puts
him under long-term sedation, basically inducing a coma (it’s previously been
established that she worked as a nurse and thereby knows her way around both
injection needles and drugs), then when she lures Samantha to her home and
overpowers her explains that she’s going to deliver Samantha’s baby herself and
then presumably eliminate Samantha’s now-inconvenient husband. It looks like
Colleen is going to succeed in her dastardly plan when the McKendrys decide to
bring Melanie back into the action as a dea ex machina, arriving at Colleen’s home in time to get her
arrested and rescue Samantha and Brad. Psycho Granny might have had some potential despite the risible
title (which could easily have been changed), but Rebekah McKendry’s direction
is slovenly and doesn’t even attempt
the noir atmosphere the story
virtually demands, while her hubby’s script leaves so many plot holes it might
have been called Loose Ends ’r Us.
About the only people I can think of who’d actually enjoy this one are
hard-core Right-wing Republican Trump supporters, and they only because in the
role of the crazy “grandma” Colleen (who carries on conversations with herself à
la Anthony Perkins in Psycho, a film which just about anyone who makes a movie
with the word “Psycho” in the title can’t help but rip off from!) Robin Riker
bears a striking resemblance to Nancy Pelosi. Indeed, one could readily imagine
Riker playing Pelosi in a biopic, and given that one of the current Republican
propaganda talking points is that Nancy Pelosi is mentally ill (and Right-wing
propagandists have produced two, count ’em, two doctored video clips supposedly proving this, at
least one of which was retweeted by Rudy Giuliani and Trump himself!), I’m sure
a lot of people on the American Right just now would love to see a film in which an actress who resembles
Pelosi is playing a homicidally crazy woman! (Clips from Psycho
Granny may even end up in their next
anti-Pelosi fake video.)
