by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Alas, the next Lifetime movie, Psycho Stripper — which had had its own “Premiere” showing six days
earlier — wasn’t anywhere nearly as good even though it had the advantage of
being written and directed by the same person: Jake Helgren, whose résumé
includes items like Nightmare Nurse, Honeymoon from Hell, Deadly
Matrimony, The Neighborhood Nightmare, The Perfect Mother and the upcoming The Party Planner. Psycho Stripper begins with a performance at a local strip club called Naughty Boyz
(the loHunter McCain (cation isn’t specified but it looked like L.A. to me even
though it was probably shot in Canada — the film’s imdb.com page doesn’t
indicate a shooting location) in which the lead male stripper has got his
female audience so hot and bothered they corner him outside the club after he
finishes for the night and virtually rape him on the street. “I’m sorry, but I
have to get back home to my girlfriend,” he tells them — to which the three
women who wanted him so desperately respond, “Eeuuuu,” which I would have found
more believable if he’d said, “I’m sorry, but I have to get back home to my
boyfriend.”
Alas, just as he’s turning to leave a sinister-looking guy in a
hoodie comes up behind him and clubs him — at first we think he’s dead and his
attacker wanted to eliminate him and get his job, but later it turns out he was
only wounded and the guy in the hoodie just wanted to wound him so he couldn’t
take a particular job. The bad guy — Lifetime’s writers in general these days
seem to be going for big, dramatic action scenes at the very beginning so we know who the principal bad guy (or bad girl) is and
build suspense over when the characters will find out and what will happen to them when they do. This is how
Alfred Hitchcock did it in most of his films, and while the journeyman
directors Lifetime gets are hardly in Hitchcock’s league (though it is clear from their suspense editing that they’ve
studied the Master’s works), it is
an effective way to build a story and keep the audience involved with the
characters. It turns out the titular psycho stripper is Hunter McCain (Tyler
Johnson) — his actual first name is “Preston” but he doesn’t use it for reasons
we don’t learn until about two-thirds of the way through the film — and the gig
he wanted so badly is the bachelorette party being thrown by dance studio
manager Amber Clarke (Karissa Lee Staples) on the eve of her marriage to Owen
Mathison (Mark Hapka, who for once in a Lifetime movie is cast with a sexually
appealing actor instead of a piece of animate Wonder bread — one could readily
understand Amber picking him over the hunkier and more muscular but also off-putting
Hunter even if Hunter weren’t
psycho). Hunter does his performance in Amber’s dance studio and forms an
obsession over Amber, going out of his way to break up her impending marriage,
even though he also continues his round of casual sex with various women he
meets at work (Helgren’s script makes this seem like one of the perks of male
stripperhood!) and he also starts dating Taryn Belle (Rachael Brooke Smith),
one of Amber’s staff dance teachers.
Hunter is so determined to get face time
with Amber that he takes her ballet class — a plot twist that reminded me of
Fred Astaire pretending to be unable to dance to get to dance instructor Ginger
Rogers in Swing Time (and Astaire
does a nice double act there, using all his magnificent powers of coordination
to make himself look like someone
totally uncoordinated) — and when we see an African-American, Danielle Sellers
(Krystal Joy Brown), on Amber’s staff we inveterate Lifetime watchers fear for
her safety — usually when a Lifetime heroine has an African-American best
friend, said friend is going to find out the villain’s plot and motives but get
killed before she can warn Our Heroine
— though this time not only does Danielle make it to the end of the movie still
alive, her Black boyfriend ends up being the best man at Owen’s and Amber’s
wedding. The wedding almost doesn’t happen because Hunter is bound and
determined to make sure it doesn’t. First he bribes a woman to show up at
Amber’s home and say she’s having an affair with Owen; then he kills an older woman
on Amber’s staff when she’s sent to the dance studio to pick up Amber’s dress
for a wedding rehearsal (and he plants the bloody scissors with which he did
the deed on a homeless man, who gets busted for the crime) — and Owen’s
1-percent mother Margot (Lisa Ann Walter) decides to hold it not at the public venue they’d planned to use but in her
lavishly equipped cabin in the mountains. (Don’t these characters in Lifetime
movies actually ever see Lifetime
movies? If they did, they’d know that a cabin in the mountains is the last place they’d want to hide from a villain!) Hunter
murders another of Amber’s co-workers and steals her car, then lets Ethan
(Jesse Kove) lead him to the mountain cabin — about the only place in Owen’s
and Amber’s lives he doesn’t know
the address to (earlier he got all the information about Owen, Amber and their
friends, including their addresses, from stealing Amber’s wedding book, copying
it and then returning it) — and outside, in a chilling scene, he takes off his
belt and uses it to strangle Ethan.
We finally learn Hunter’s motives — though Helgren’s script
dropped us a hint early on in the action when Amber stumbled on an old tablet
computer of Owen’s and saw photos of his previous girlfriend Megan, whom Amber
thought looked quite a bit like her. At the end of the movie we learn that
Megan previously dated Hunter until she broke up with him and married Owen;
that Megan subsequently died under mysterious circumstances (he seemed to be
broken up by the death but it’s also possible we were supposed to think he
killed her out of jealousy), and therefore he determined to wreck Owen’s life
by seducing his new girlfriend
away from him. In the end, Owen grabs an ax because it’s the only weapon he can
find to fight back against Hunter — he ends up sticking it in a tree stump but,
in the sort of over-the-top climax Lifetime writers love, Amber ends up pushing
Hunter off the place’s outdoor second-floor balcony and Hunter is impaled by
the ax and it therefore kills him after all. The one good aspect of Psycho
Stripper is Tyler Johnson’s performance in
the title role — he’s hunky and muscular as all get-out (and Helgren as
director gives us a lot of
bare-chested views of him — yum!) and he plays the character with an engaging,
infectious sort of boyish charm that seems aimed at persuading the other
characters, “You think I did all
those horrible things? Who — me?”
The rest of it, though, is pretty normal Lifetime, and the business of waiting
all movie to find out What Made Hunter Run is a trial on one’s patience —
especially if one is an inveterate Lifetime watcher and one knows this guy
probably isn’t a random stalker and has some deep dark secret in his past that involves the
heroine, at least peripherally, that’s going to turn out to be his motive.
