by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched last
night’s Lifetime “premiere” and the latest in their “Ripped from the
Headlines!” sequence of TV-movies. Actually, if this one was “Ripped from the Headlines”
it was ripped from the headlines of old, yellowing slabs of newsprint because
the original event dramatized here happened in 1980, but it was a good story
nonetheless. It was called Abducted: The Mary Stauffer Story, though it was originally shot as 55 Days:
The Abduction of Mary Stauffer, which
somewhat gives away the ending given that a lot of the suspense around the plot
is about just how long the ordeal
of Mary Stauffer (Alyson Hannigan) and her eight-year old daughter Beth (an
excellent performance by child actor Daphne Hoskins that should mark her for
biggers and betters) will last and whether and under what circumstances they’ll
be rescued. Mary Stauffer is the wife of a minister, Irv Stauffer (Daniel
Nemes, a considerably more handsome actor than usually gets cast as the
innocent husband in a Lifetime movie and also someone I’d like to see more of),
and they have two kids, Beth — whom they persist in calling “Bethy” for some
reason (I can readily imagine her confronting her parents and saying, “No more
of this ‘Bethy’ garbage! My name’s Beth,” much the way my husband Charles told his mother he never wanted to be
called “Charlie,” “Chuck” or anything but “Charles”) — and Steven (Miles
Phoenix Foley). The location is Roseville, Minnesota and the time is June 1980;
school has just let out and, much to the irritation of their kids, the adult
Stauffers have decided to take the family on a missionary trip to the
Philippines. Alas, just as they’re deep into planning and packing for their
trip Mary and Beth Stauffer are held at gunpoint by a mysterious stranger
neither of them immediately recognizes. The young man, who looks vaguely Asian
under his big glasses (not that different, ironically, from the ones Mary
Stauffer herself wears), isn’t quite as much of a stranger as the Stauffers
think. Mary Stauffer has been a high-school teacher in the neighborhood for
about 20 years, and it seems that 15 years before their kidnapper, Ming Sen
Shiue (Howie Lai) got a bad grade in Mary’s freshman English class, and one
presumes his overall GPA was on such a thin edge of eligibility he lost the
college scholarship he was hoping for. It’s hard to tell whether he’s more
motivated by the bad grade that sandbagged his chances for college or the
sexual crush he also developed on Mary Stauffer back then, but he’s brutal
about it: he forces both female Stauffers into their own car and tells Mary, at
gunpoint, to drive to a deserted location.
He intends to abandon their car and
switch to his own, a white minivan, but on the way he forces the Stauffers into
the trunk of their car and a couple of kids riding their bikes through the
woods spot him. The kids are Jason Wilkman and his sister, and when Jason spots
Ming putting the Stauffers into their car trunk he innocently asks him, “You
having car trouble?” That gets him kidnapped along with them and eventually
killed as Ming decides it’s too risky to have a potential witness — though the
cops are already aware that something is going on because the sister escaped Ming’s notice, survives and
told her parents what happened to her brother. Indeed, ironically the cops blow
off Irv Stauffer’s attempts to report his wife and daughter missing because
they’re too concerned about finding Jason Wilkman’s kidnapper. Meanwhile, Ming
moves the Stauffers into his own home, which he’s tricked up with curtains,
boards, soundproofing and locks to make sure they can’t get away. He locks them
in a closet with only a slop bucket for them to use to relieve themselves —
though Mary eventually talks him into letting them use the bathroom normally —
and for nearly two months he holds them hostage, going back and forth between
punishing them with more locks and restraints when they try to escape or summon
help and letting his boot at least a bit off their faces when they behave. The
best aspect of this film is that writer Vickerman and director Jim Donovan make
Ming Sen Shiue a multidimensional character, neither the nostril-flaring,
shrieking psycho of pre-1960 movies nor the disarmingly gentle boy-next-door
psycho Anthony Perkins played in Hitchcock’s Psycho and who’s been copied in countless movies since.
He’s also rather attractive — one could readily imagine him attracting somebody (female or male) if he tried courting normally,
especially since in the scenes where he’s only wearing one of those skimpy
T-shirts ironically called a “wife-beater” above the waist he’s enviably
muscular and even genuinely hunky.
One quirk of the story is that Ming was not
only a psychopathic killer (it’s only towards the end of the film that we
realize he killed that poor kid Jason Wilkman just for being in the wrong place
and the wrong time, but we assume he did, and had director Donovan put in the
sound of a single gunshot in the distance over the scene of the Stauffers’ cowering
in the trunk of their car while Ming is killing Jason, this already chilling
movie would be even more so) but also one of the early pioneers in making and
selling personal computers. He’s shown in a speech about how computers will
soon be routine appliances in ordinary people’s homes, and his electronic
skills are such that well before he actually kidnapped Mary Stauffer, he bugged
their bedroom and heard just what Irv and Mary Stauffer sounded like when they
made love. So when he demands that Mary Stauffer “make love” to him just like
she did with her husband, instead of submitting to rape out of resignation and
fear for her (and her daughter’s) life, he’s got the knowledge base on which to
judge her performance. Had Wickerman and Donovan included some kinky soft-core
porn scenes between the two — with Ming eagerly having his way with her and
Mary having somehow to convince
her assailant that she’s enjoying the whole thing — this would have been an
even stronger movie, and though this didn’t really happen I found myself
wondering how Mary would have reacted if Ming had got her pregnant. Though the
denomination of the Stauffers’ church is not mentioned, I found myself pretty
much assuming they were some sort of evangelical sect who, among other things,
would be passionately against abortion — and how a minister with those leanings
would handle his wife coming home from a two-month ordeal at the hands of a
sexual sadist bearing his child, and how he would have handled the dilemma of
his church teachings telling him he needed to help raise and support his wife’s
rapist’s child, would itself have made for an interesting movie even though it
would no longer have qualified as “Ripped from the Headlines!”
I was also
impressed by the way Wickerman and Donovan shifted the balance in the
mother-daughter relationship: at the start Beth was almost screaming at her
mother to defy their kidnapper and get the two of them home as soon as
possible, but about midway through the movie Beth stopped resisting (a bit of
Stockholm syndrome, perhaps?) and urged her mom against any escape attempts, while mom kept resisting until
she finally found a chink in Ming’s armor: a loose pin in a door hinge that,
even though restrained, she was able to work loose and get the door to fall down
so they could pull loose from the restraints and escape. The filmmakers were
also skillful in working in what already seems like antediluvian technology
into their plot: not only are the cars driven both by the Stauffers and the
cops the sort of big, hulking beasts (as opposed to the tank-like SUV’s all too
many modern-day drivers indulge in) but the phone Mary Stauffer uses to alert
the police that they’re free and where they are has a rotary dial (and she has
to dlal a lot more numbers than
just “911” to reach the cops). The only aspect of Abducted: The Mary
Stauffer Story that rubbed me the wrong way
was the infuriating piety of it all: throughout it all Mary Stauffer’s
voiceover narration tells us again and again and again that her faith in God sustained her through her
ordeal and gave her comfort that somehow this horrible thing that had happened
to her and her daughter was nonetheless part of God’s plan for them and they
would emerge stronger. I found myself wondering how a committed atheist would handle
a similar ordeal — and indeed whether the filmmakers actually wanted to communicate the message, “You’d better believe in
God, because if you don’t you’ll have no source of hope to fall back and rely
on in case a psycho kidnapper gets you into his clutches and keeps you in
captivity for almost two months.”
There was a brief (about 10 minutes) epilogue
in the form of a mini-Behind the Headlines episode of Mary and Beth Stauffer — the real ones — as they appear
now, including mentioning the bizarre epilogue to the story that while he was
on trial for kidnapping the Stauffers and (a separate proceeding) the murder of
Jason Wilkman — for which he ultimately received a life sentence but
with the possibility of parole, which means
the Stauffers and the Wilkmans have to keep trooping into parole board meetings
to persuade them not to let the S.O.B. out, much the way the families of
Charles Manson’s victims had to keep coming to his parole hearings until Manson’s death finally
relieved them of that burden — at one point in the proceedings Ming somehow got
access to a pocket knife and slashed Mary Stauffer’s face with it, leaving a
scar that was quite obvious in the photos of the time even though it’s receded
(although it’s still visible) over time. Apparently Ming Sei Shiue is still obsessed with Mary Stauffer and is planning to kill
her if he ever gets out — or, if she’s already dead, to kill her relatives (of
which there are quite a few because both Beth and Steven Stauffer are married
and have kids of their own). Just what made Ming go so far off the rails and fasten so intently to the
Stauffers, Mary in particular, is never quite explained by Vickerman’s script,
but it really doesn’t need to be; Abducted: The Mary Stauffer Story is a powerful, well-staged, well-acted drama even
though it literally gets too
preachy a lot of the time!
