Monday, July 22, 2019

My Stepfather's Secret (Feifer Productions, SF Productions, Lifetime, 2019)

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

Last night’s Lifetime movie was billed as a “premiere” but it must have been shown somewhere before since there were already five reviews of it on imdb.com, including one from a viewer who said s/he couldn’t evaluate the movie because the music was so loud it drowned out the dialogue. It was called My Stepfather’s Secret and was an O.K. movie within the Lifetime genre. It was a product of Michael Feifer’s production company and, like a lot of his movies, dealt with a man who comes into a relationship with a woman withholding a deep, dark secret — though we don’t find out what the secret is until the very end of the movie and it’s something of a surprise compared with the usual ones Lifetime’s writers cook up. (Feifer directed this one personally and the script is by Stephen Lyons, though I suspect Feifer, the producer as well as the director, pretty much dictated the basic elements and left Lyons to flesh them out.) Bailey Kershaw (Paris Smith) has just completed her freshman (freshperson?) year in college when she returns home for the summer to her mother Tina (Vanessa Marcil — her last name sounds like a drug you inhale to cure your sinuses from an attack of hay fever). The main way we can tell mother and daughter apart is mom wears granny glasses — the big ones with black frames that were briefly fashionable in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s — and her hair is even longer and straighter than her on-screen daughter’s.

Tina has been raising Bailey as a single parent since the death of her father five years earlier — he was shot on a rooftop by the usual hooded assailant in a prologue we’re shown even though its significance, as usual with Lifetime, won’t be explained until the end — and judging from the flashbacks we see of a young Bailey with her dad, it seems the biggest thing her parents had in common was similarly bad eyes that required them to wear those big glasses. When Bailey returns home she finds her mom in the middle of an intense affair with a mysterious man named Hugo (Eddie McClintock, who’s so tall, muscular and hunky — he’s working, or at least says he is, as a physical trainer and his body is buff enough it’s believable — we hardened Lifetime movie-watchers know instantly that he’s a villain), whom she’s passionately in love with and wants to marry. (Writer Lyons carefully establishes that Hugo is the first man Tina has shown any romantic or sexual interest in since the mysterious death of her husband.) Bailey notices that Hugo seems to be taking an unusual interest in her, and for a while I wondered if this plot was heading towards Lolita territory (the pedophile marries the mother just to get access to the daughter) or, even worse, that he was a human trafficker who was going to murder Tina and sell Bailey to a crime ring as a sex slave. At one point Hugo receives a shipment of protein packs that blocks Bailey from getting her car out of the garage, so Hugo lends her his car — and while driving it she’s accosted by a heavy-set bald-headed thug type straight out of Cueball-meets-Luthor who seems disappointed that it’s she and not Hugo driving.

Bailey also notices Hugo doing her laundry, including carefully folding her underwear, which she and we both think is “creepy.” Mom, of course, pleads with her daughter to give the new man in her life a chance, while the daughter finds out that Hugo has hacked into the computer in her room (a desktop model she inherited from her dad) and is using its video camera to spy on her. Bailey hooks up with her former boyfriend Anders (played by beautiful baby-faced Tanner Fontana, who probably had most of whatever Gay male audience there is for Lifetime drooling) to do some computer hacking of their own, and they finally discover that Bailey’s dad was involved with a father-and-son team of Japanese computer geniuses to create an international cryptocurrency, only their third partner — you guessed it, Hugo — was upset about being frozen out and wanted to steal the $3.7 million Bailey’s dad had accumulated in a secret fund. The money is encoded in a flash drive — how’s that for a 21st century MacGuffin? — but Hugo also needs the password set by Bailey’s late father (whom Hugo shot when Bailey’s dad refused to tell it to him) to access the fortune. It’s basically a high-tech version of Gaslight — for some reason the basic gimmick of a man marrying a woman he doesn’t love to gain access to some physical possession that will make him rich but she doesn’t know she has has become a popular trope these days and is even referred to in screenwriting and filmmaking circles as “gaslighting” — in which the secret treasure is not jewels or rare paintings (as it was in Kind Lady, a film that came even before Gaslight) but something to do with computers and their increasing conquest of the world.

Spoiler alert: It all ends at, you guessed it, a deserted mountain cabin, formerly owned by Bailey’s dad but unused since his death except when Bailey and her boyfriend Anders would go for a clandestine rendezvous — where Bailey and her two girlfriends — including Fee (Dara Renee), a Black girl Bailey met at college and whom Feifer and Lyons seemed to be setting up for the Lifetime cliché role of the African-American best friend who stumbles onto the villain’s plan but gets killed before she can reveal it to the heroine, but is blessedly alive at the final credits — converge and get trapped by Hugo, who’s overheard Bailey’s conversation to Anders and thus learns where the flash drive is. Hugo threatens Bailey and Anders with a gun; Anders clubs Hugo with a shovel but stupidly neglects to grab Hugo’s gun before Hugo comes to, only Bailey gets the gun away from him and shoots him herself — not fatally, however, because in the meantime Bailey’s mom Tina and her friend Fee have called the police and they take Hugo alive, while a tag scene shows Bailey reconciled with her mom (it helps that while Bailey and Hugo were confronting each other, Bailey had her cell phone on with her mom at the other end of the call, so Tina got to hear Hugo tell Bailey how repulsive he found it that he had to sleep with Tina for his plot to work), her girlfriends alive and well, and she and Anders giving each other a peck-like kiss to indicate that they’ve reconciled (earlier Bailey had broken up with Anders because she’d hoped he’d go to the same college she did, and he didn’t want to go to college at all). It’s an O.K. movie even though Michael Feifer is unlikely to make anything again with the hallucinatory power of His Secret Family (in which the shocking secret the heroine learns about the villain is he’s a bigamist, she’s wife number two, and with his finances having taken a hit in the recession he’s calmly planning to eliminate the extra expense of a second family by bumping off both her and their daughter — who, just to show how Michael Feifer can both ramp up the tension and pull the heartstrings, also suffers from a rare blood disease and only a bone-marrow transplant from her father can treat her), and he checks off the Lifetime cliché boxes and fills the cast with talented, workmanlike actors who play their parts professionally but don’t bring much special to them.