by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Sunday night, February 23, I watched a couple of Lifetime movies that were
part of an all-weekend marathon of “Wrong … ” movies featuring Vivica A. Fox, a
buxom, middle-aged African-American actress who usually plays the Black
authority figure who helps the white characters sort out their problems. The
two I watched last night, The Wrong Mommy
(2019) and The Wrong Tutor
(2018), were both Hybrid LLC productions, with Fox credited as one of the
“executive producers” as well as an actor, and both were directed by David
DeCoteau, though they had different writing teams. The Wrong Mommy was credited to Jeffrey Schenck, Peter Sullivan and
Robert Dean Klein (the first two for “story” and Klein for “script”) while The
Wrong Tutor was written, apparently solo,
by Adam Rocks-Off — oops, I mean Rockoff. Both adhered quite tightly to the
Lifetime formula, though with some intriguing variations. The Wrong
Mommy — not to be confused with another
Lifetlme movie from 2017, The Wrong Mother, produced by a different team for a different company
(Cartel Entertainment) — deals with the Anderson family: dad Alex (the
genuinely hot Jason Shane-Scott — for once the innocent husband in a Lifetime
movie is played by someone genuinely sexy instead of the usual tall, lanky,
sandy-haired blah type); mom Melanie (Jessica Morris); and daughter Tina
(Jillian Spitz). Melanie’s mother, Carol Graham (Dee Wallace, the mother of the
central human family in E.T.),
also lives with them but leaves on an extended trip at the beginning of the
show and doesn’t return until the end. Melanie is the family breadwinner; she’s
got a promotion at the ad agency she works for, owned by Samantha (Vivica A.
Fox, in flattering pantsuits and long, flowing hair instead of the “sensible”
dresses and butch cuts she usually wears as the African-American authority
figure). Alex also has some sort of job, but it’s less well paid and the
writing committee never bothers to tell us what it is.
One of the perks of
Melanie’s new job is she gets to hire her own assistant, and though she has her
eye (so to speak) on a male candidate, ultimately Phoebe Sutton (Ashlynn
Yennie) gets the job. Needless to say, given that she’s a character in a
Lifetime movie with the word “Wrong” in the title, she’s Up To No Good from the
get-go. She seems nice enough but she has a chip on her shoulder that comes, we
find out later, from having been an orphan: her mother died of cancer when she
was three and her father died when she was six. She was briefly taken in by a
grandmother but grandma decided she couldn’t handle going through the
child-raising thing again and
palmed her off on the foster-care system, where at least one of her foster dads
raped her. She frequently tells Melanie that some people have it all and others
have nothing, and though Melanie ignores this we know it’s a warning that Phoebe is planning to move
in and take over Melanie’s life: her job, her husband, her daughter, her home.
Through the whole movie we’re kept in suspense as to What Makes Phoebe Run: she
gets cruised by one of the agency’s biggest clients, car dealer Roger (Eric
Roberts, who seems to be reduced to playing these seedy old letches on Lifetime
films), and they trade dirty pictures of each other’s private parts online and
finally meet — only Phoebe strangles him to death, apparently because he
resembled the foster father who molested her. She also kills a couple of other
people who catch on to her secret, including Jason (Jared Scott), a teenager
with a skill for computer hacking who caught on to Phoebe’s real name — Lisa
Nolan — and history: she was in a halfway house for two months after having
been released from a women’s prison on an assault charge; and Kellyanne
(Dominique Swain, a talented actress who deserves better — and longer — parts
than this), who was her Lesbian lover in prison, followed her to the halfway
house and agreed to serve as a fake “reference” for her so she could get the
job with Melanie.
Phoebe also steals a list of potential contacts for new
accounts from one of her co-workers and justifies it in an almost Trumpian
manner that it’s a dog-eat-dog world and you need to do what you have to do to
get ahead — and she’s so good she even fools Samantha, who wonders if she
should fire Melanie and give Phoebe her job. (It’s ultra-rare for a Vivica A.
Fox character to be taken in by the villainess.) Then Carol Graham (ya remember
Carol Graham?) returns from her
long-term vacation and we find out what this was really all about: for much of
the movie I was thinking the Lifetime cliché they were going to pull was that
Alex had had an affair — or at least a one-night stand — with Phoebe and Phoebe
had formed an obsession about it, but the ultimate resolution is a bit more
creative than that. Remember that Phoebe’s mom died when she was three and her
dad died when she was six? Well, it seems that in the intervening period after
her mom died, her dad remarried — only after dad died his new wife decided she
wanted no part of the burden of raising a child as a single mother when she had
no biological connection with her at all. So she palmed little Lisa on her
dad’s mom, who then threw her onto the untender mercies of the foster-care
system — and the woman who did that to Lisa was Carol Graham, Melanie
Anderson’s mother. So Lisa, now Phoebe, blames Melanie and her mom for cheating
her out of the life she deserved. The Wrong Mommy is an O.K. Lifetime movie redeemed by Ashlynn
Yennie’s performance as Phoebe; she manages the barely motivated shifts in the
character’s character on a dime and etches a vivid portrait of a woman torn
apart by a rough life filled with rejection that has left her literally
homicidally crazy. Despite her tongue-twisting mouthful of a name, this is a
woman that deserves major stardom!
