Actually Lifetime did no
favors to the makers of their next film on the schedule, 2017’s Psycho
Wedding Crasher, by scheduling it right
after Psycho Party Planner, since it’s a much better movie. Though the formula is pretty much the
same — seemingly “perfect” young character comes between the (straight) couple
leads with nefarious interests of her own (this time — possible spoiler alert —
she does intend to replace the
woman in the couple and end up with the man), writers Ken Sanders, Daniel West
and [J.] Bryan Dick (two of them — Sanders and Dick — were instrumental in
creating the “Whittendale Universe,” in which young women fund their tuition at
ultra-exclusive Whittendale University by turning tricks with older men,
sometimes renting themselves out as long-term mistresses) bring a real sense of
Gothic horror and power to this one. The titular psycho wedding crasher is one
of the most multidimensional characters ever created by Lifetime writers —
especially ones who aren’t Christine Conradt — since she starts out as a
sympathetic, put-upon figure oddly resembling Cinderella. Her name is Jenna
Kravitz (Heather Morris) and she’s living with her aunt Daisy (a marvelously
etched pure-evil performance by Jane Van Ark rivaling Jo Van Fleet in the 1955 East
of Eden and Ellen Burstyn as the
mother-from-hell in the recent Lifetime filming of V. C. Andrews’ Flowers in
the Attic). Aunt Daisy operates a
business out in the middle of the sticks of wherever this takes place (I
suspect the Pacific Northwest somewhere so they could cross the border easily
and film in Vancouver, where this was indeed shot) called Daisy’s Wedding
Corner, advertised by a big white sign in a friendly, classy-looking typeface
outside what looks like a decrepit log cabin. Though the interior is modern,
Daisy’s attitudes aren’t: she inherited responsibility for Jenna when Jenna’s
dad (Daisy’s brother) was killed in a car crash following the departure of
Jenna’s mom, whom Daisy had warned her brother not to marry in the first place,
warning him that his wife-to-be was a dissolute slut, and who eventually fled
the Kravitz manse, presumably to go do her
drinking and slutting elsewhere until the risks of those behaviors finally
caught up with her. And just to make things more macabre, in addition to having
a guardian who combines the worst characteristics of Cinderella’s stepmother
and stepsisters, the Wicked Witch of the West, and the mother from Flowers
in the Attic, Jenna also still has her
father watching over her; he may be dead, but the urn containing his ashes has
a prominent place in the center of the Kravitzes’ mantelpiece and it’s sort of
like he’s watching over them.
Once the Kravitzes are established as characters,
the writers and director David Langlois cut to the wedding plans of Glenn Cooper
(Jason Cermak, who’s had at least a few feature-film credits, notably as the wedding photographer in Fifty
Shades of Grey, and who’s tall, blond,
boyishly attractive and considerably cuter than the actors Lifetime usually
casts as the innocent husbands or husbands-to-be) and Marci Belle (Fiona
Bloom). Only as (bad) luck would have it they’ve gone to Daisy’s Wedding
Counter to get her wedding dress, and in one scene Glenn happens by as Jenna is
taking a minor stumble on the front stairs of Daisy’s place. He catches her
before she falls, and she’s immediately smitten with him — so much so that she
crashes his wedding and makes plans to separate him from his new wife almost as
soon as they tie the knot. Like a lot of Lifetime villainesses, she resorts to
every trick she can think of, including murder, to get what she wants — though
the first person she kills is Aunt Daisy and we’re really not sorry to see the
Wicked Witch of this movie go. (Jenna strangles her with a tape measure, and
while my husband Charles questioned whether a cloth tape measure would create
enough pressure to garrote anybody, it looked like it was made of plastic to me
and that would probably do the
trick. The dramatis personae in the Coopers’ part of the plot include Glenn, Marci, Glenn’s friend
Scott Harrison (Robert Salvador) — the two have an argument during the
preparations for the ceremony in which Scott makes it clear he has no interest
in tying himself down to any one woman and he’s going to seduce as many of them
as he can get — and Chelsea Allen (Paula Giroday), Marci’s best friend and
Glenn’s ex until he decided that Marci, not Chelsea, was the right girl for
him. Marci reaches out to Jenna because she seems awfully lonely and doesn’t
get out to have fun or date; she brings her along to a party at Chelsea’s
place, where Jenna palms an earring and a pair of panties from Chelsea’s
bedroom dresser and plants them in the Coopers’ guest-room bed to make it look
to Marci like Glenn and Chelsea have resumed their affair.
Jenna also leaves the
party with Scott and goes to his place, where he tries to get her drunk and
play a “game” with her: a stack of blocks on his coffee table in which the
player is supposed to do whatever instruction is inscribed on the block. Of
course the blocks are stacked in more ways than one: the idea is to get the
woman who’s fallen for Scott’s invitation to undress so he can have his wicked
way with her, especially once he’s got her sufficiently drunk. Scott grabs her
as she realizes what’s happening and tries to flee, and once she’s out of his
place she slams her own head against the steering wheel of her car to make it
look like Scott actively assaulted her worse than he did. Jenna then shows up
at Marci’s place and convinces Marci to take her in as a house guest —
whereupon Jenna plants the earring and panties and Marci is so convinced of
Glenn’s guilt that she throws him out of the house. Jenna isn’t finished with
her deadly pranks: she also tricks Chelsea into going to Scott’s place and
kills both of them (why?), staging it to look like a murder-suicide following a
drunken argument between two tempestuous lovers. The climax features her
overpowering Marci and tying her up, then offering herself to Glenn at long
last — the script establishes that she’s still a virgin and she’s saving
herself for Mr. Right, whoever her twisted mind conceives that to be at the
moment — and though ultimately the police arrive at Jenna’s house and rescue
Glenn and Marci, who’ve already begun to reconcile despite the accusations of
infidelity that still hovered over them until they finally realized Jenna had merely set it up to look like Glenn and the late Chelsea were having an
affair, Jenna herself escapes and looks like she’s going to pull something
similar on another unsuspecting guy in another town. Like a lot of other
Lifetime movies that have involved Ken Sanders and Bryan Dick, there seem to be
a lot of Hitchcock influences —
they even borrowed the chilling conceit from Hitchcock’s Rope of having Jenna invite people over and seat them
on the large chest we know, but they don’t, contains Aunt Daisy’s body (though
Charles wondered whether it wouldn’t start to smell after a while) — and
they’ve got a good cast even though Fiona Vroom looks about ten years older
than Jason Cermak and one wonders why he’s marrying her instead of the alternatives available.
Psycho
Wedding Planner is unusually rich for a
Lifetime movie — Jenna isn’t a stick-figure villainess but a character we have
a sort of twisted sympathy for; like Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho (a film that obviously influenced this one,
especially in the relationship of Jenna to her mother-figure, who unlike
Norman’s mom is still alive but is equally vicious towards her and clearly
we’re supposed to think Aunt Daisy made Jenna a psycho and she’d have grown up normal if she’d had a decent
pair of parents to raise her instead of this malevolent bitch). It’s also a
film that brings up my own highly conflicted feelings towards monogamy: Marci
tells Glenn (and us) that one reason she’s so hyper-concerned about Glenn’s
(alleged) cheating was that throughout her own childhood her dad cheated on her
mom and she never forgave her dad for doing it — or her mom for forgiving it.
I’ve occasionally mentioned in these pages the interesting argument Andrew
Sullivan made in his 1990’s writings on same-sex marriage that he hoped the
example of Gay men, who generally had a much looser attitude towards sexual
fidelity to their partners than straight people, would serve as an example for
straight couples to be less obsessed about “fidelity” and defining it as sexual
exclusivity. Instead the opposite has happened: extending marriage as an
institution to Gay couples has made Gay men more jealous, more possessive and more like straight
people in seeing “straying” as an existential threat to their relationships.
There’s a part of me that understood the hurt Marci would have felt when she
felt her husband was going behind her back and screwing his ex barely a month
into their marriage, and there’s a part of me that wanted to tell her, “So he’s
sleeping with another woman. So what? That’s just what men do — get over it!”
