by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie was actually
unusually good, despite some typical plot holes from writer-director Michael
Feifer. It was called Anniversary Nightmare
and it begins with Liz Thompson (AnnaLynne McCord, top-billed) and her husband
Andrew (Philip Boyd) deciding to celebrate their 10th wedding
anniversary by taking a vacation to Hawai’i and leaving their two kids behind
with her mom and dad. They rent a lavish villa at a Hawai’ian resort and have a
hot first night together — they even have sex, and Feifer shows some delicious
soft-core porn of them doing so — only when Liz wakes up the next morning
Andrew isn’t next to her. In fact, he isn’t anywhere at all; she can’t find
him, and when the police arrive at the villa they find a burning corpse outside
the villa and arrest Liz for the murder of her husband. Liz’s mom, an attorney
(as was Liz before she gave it up to get married — how retro!), takes her case
and raises the bail money so Liz can get out of custody in Hawai’i — but then
mom makes the mistake of having jurisdiction of the case transferred to Los
Angeles, where they live (can you
move a state criminal case from one jurisdiction to another? I don’t think
so!), so Liz can be in town and spend the time awaiting trial at home with her
kids.
Only, while the Hawai’ian judge granted her bail, the L.A. judge (who’s
also a long-time friend of Liz’s mom) announces that under the California court
rules, she can’t grant bail and has to hold Liz over until her trial — which
could be months or even years away. (The judge cites “extenuating
circumstances” she’s learned from the court in Hawai’i that forbid her from
granting bail — which didn’t ring true, not only because those would have had
to be disclosed to Liz’s defense counsel but also the phrase “extenuating
circumstances” usually means factors that suggest the defendant should be
treated more leniently, not more harshly; I think the word Feifer meant was
“exigent” or “aggravating” circumstances.) In a film that’s already put its
heroine through some pretty Kafka-esque nightmare situations — including waking
up one morning on vacation and finding her husband missing, while she herself
was full of drugs she didn’t normally use (obviously someone went through a
great deal of trouble to frame her, including forcing drugs into her so she’d
sleep through the crime) — her fish-out-of-water stint in the Los Angeles
county jail is the best part of the movie. She befriends her cellmate and two
other hard-core cons — one of whom is a hard-bitten white woman who declares a
Lesbian interest in Our Heroine, and the other is a Black prisoner with a
disarming manner whom I thought was being set up to be the African-American
best friend who discovers the villain’s sinister plot against the heroine but
gets killed for her pains. As part of the prison routine the inmates are
transported in orange jump suits but have to change into mauve shirts and pants
for their actual incarceration — “I guess mauve is the new orange,” I couldn’t
help but joke — and eventually one of the prisoners smuggles in a copy of the
dental records of the burning corpse the Hawai’ian cops found at the villa —
and they don’t match Andrew’s, leading Liz to wonder if her husband is still
alive.
At this point my husband Charles was beginning to think Andrew had
staged his own disappearance and faked his death to rid himself of an
inconvenient wife and family, and start over — but Feifer, who’s actually done
that plot line in previous Lifetime films like His Secret Family (a movie about bigamy that still haunts me), didn’t
go there this time. Instead, Liz starts having flashbacks to That Night in Hawai’i and decides she
needs to escape from prison and go back to the villa to jog her memory of what
happened. She does this by faking an illness, getting admitted to the jail
infirmary — which seems to be considerably less secure than the rest of it —
stealing an emergency medical technician’s uniform and sneaking out of the
ambulance again once it leaves the jail and getting picked up by an appealingly
butch woman truck driver (a character I’d have liked to see more of) and makes
it back to her parents’ place. (Remember that mom is an attorney and therefore
an officer of the court who is legally required to report a fugitive to the authorities on pain of
losing her law license — even if the fugitive is her own daughter. I say
remember that because Michael Feifer seems to have forgotten it.) Mom and dad
arrange for her to fly to Hawai’i, hurrying before her name shows up on a
do-not-fly list, and she meets up with Gabriel (Jabez Armodia), who claims
she’s a friend of a fellow inmate back home who used her connections with him
to get him to help Liz prove her innocence. Then she runs into Jesse (Mark
Medeiros), who tells Liz that he kidnapped her husband and made it look like
she murdered him because, as a junior attorney with the Hawai’i prosecutor’s
office, she prosecuted him and sent him to prison for 10 years for being the
lookout in a robbery where two people were murdered and he was the only one prosecuted because his three confederates
successfully got away. So now he’s going to show her what it’s like to serve a long sentence for a crime
you didn’t commit.
Jesse says he’ll tell Liz where her husband is in exchange
for $250,000 ransom — which is Liz’s and Andrew’s entire life savings — and it
turns out Gabriel is Jesse’s younger brother and the two were both in on the
scheme. Only when the exchange is about to be made Gabriel just wants to take
the money and flee, while Jesse is so angry with Liz that he wants to shoot her
and Andrew. Gabriel talks his brother out of it and they escape with the money,
while Liz and Andrew return home and Liz decides to return to her legal career
and form a firm that will reach out to women in prison and help them win better
conditions and appeal their cases. Despite some plot holes, all too typical of
Feifer’s writing, Anniversary Nightmare is actually a quite good piece of neo-noir, and the situations and predicaments Feifer puts his
heroine through are almost Kafka-esque in their intensity. There’s legitimate
suspense here not only over the question of what really happened to Andrew and
who’s behnd the elaborate attempt to frame Liz for his murder (though it’s hard
to believe two such small-time grifters as Jesse and Gabriel could have
concocted such an elaborate plot) but how Liz is caught up in the conventional
wisdom among law-enforcement officers that if a married person is murdered the
initial suspect is almost always
the person they were married to. I wouldn’t say Anniversary Nightmare is Lifetime at its very best, but it’s pretty damned
close and a lot better than I usually expect from Michael Feifer!
