by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Alas, while the preceding
Lifetime movie telecast last Sunday, February 23, The Wrong Mommy, at least had a compelling villainess performance
by the oddly named but quite good Ashlynn Yennie, the movie they followed it up
with, The Wrong Tutor — also a production of the Canadian
studio Hybrid and directed by David DeCoteau — was a strictly formula piece
with nothing much to recommend it aside from some nice shirtless glimpses of
the male lead, Eric (Nate Wyatt), a soccer star at the high school in Caroline
County (we’re not told in what state), who as the film begins is at a party
with his girlfriend Jessica “Jess” Brand (Li Eubanks). They’re in an upstairs
bedroom in the house where the party is taking place, and Jess wants Eric to
spend the night with her — it’s not sure whether she’s expecting sex from him
or just wants them both to sleep off their drunks rather than try to make it
home. But Eric begs off and ends up being busted by a cop for DUI and having
his license suspended. This just adds to the heap of troubles facing him: he’s
being raised by a single mom, Carol (Vivica A. Fox) who’s made it clear she
blames Jess for his current troubles and wants him to dump her. He’s also
depending on a soccer scholarship to be able to afford college, only he’s in
danger of being dropped from the team because of his slipping grades.
What
seems like salvation arrives in the form of Emily Miller (Ivy Matheson), a
blonde white girl — Nate Wyatt is racially ambiguous but both the actors
playing his mom and his girlfriend are clearly and obviously African-American —
who’s just transferred from another school in the area and meets Eric in his
calculus class (why is an aspiring athlete taking something as academically
challenging as calculus?), on
which he’s got an F on the latest test. She offers to tutor him, but what he
doesn’t know — though we do — is that she’s not only got the hots for him,
she’s been secretly stalking him. Her tutoring works — she gets his calculus
grades up from F to B — but he gets progressively irritated at the moves she’s
putting on him and keeps reminding her that he already has a girlfriend. At one
point she makes the mistake of telling her, “If Jess didn’t exist … ,” and this
leaves Emily determined to create the conditions for Jess’s non-existence.
She’s got a clue as to how to do this — earlier she’s seen Jess carrying an
EpiPen in her locker because she’s deathly allergic to stinging insects,
including bees and wasps — so she slips some wasps into Jess’s car and the
insects sting her and nearly kill her. Only she gets out her EpiPen in time and
the dose keeps her alive long enough for her to be rescued and taken to the
hospital — where Emily breezes in, all sweetness, light and faux concern. In the one interesting and ironic switch
on the usual Lifetime formulae screenwriter Adam Rockoff pulls, Eric’s mother
Carol, who can’t stand Jess, adores Emily and wishes her son would date Emily
instead of Jess. Only Eric makes it clear that as appreciative as he is of
Emily helping her with his calculus, he really doesn’t like her “that way” —
whereupon Emily responds by breaking into his house (she’s stolen his key and
also observed him turn off the burglar alarm, so she knows its code) and
slipping next to him in bed while he sleeps, obviously hoping his teenage hormones
will respond and he’ll fuck her no matter what the potential repercussions to his other
relationships, including Jess’s.
When he doesn’t take the bait, she responds by
making a sexual harassment complaint against him, which is heard by the school principal (Jackée
Harry) in one of those grotesque perversions of due process that have become
endemic in the #MeToo era: he’s told that the complaint exists but he isn’t
told what the charges are against him because that would be violating the
complainant’s privacy. (One of the things I don’t like about the #MeToo
movement is their blithe insistence that the basic protections of the Sixth
Amendment — that someone accused of a crime has the right “to be informed of
the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses
against him” — come with a secret asterisk and a footnote attached that reads,
“Unless the accusations have something to do with sex.”) When he finally does find out what he’s being charged with, the
principal evidence against him is her allegation that in trying to force
himself on her, he grabbed her and left bruises on her arm; the bruises are
real, all right, but he caused them while trying to throw her out of his bedroom where she had come to force herself
on him. Threatened with the loss
of everything he cares about — his schoolwork, his place on the soccer team,
his chances for college and his relationship with Jess — Eric fights back, and
Jess helps by tracing Emily’s true background. It seems that at the school she
previously attended before transferring to Eric’s, Emily cruised Rob O’Shea
(Nathan Varnson), the star of their soccer team, and they had a brief affair, only he broke it off because
she was crazy. Jess gets this story out of him and he receives a text asking
for a meeting after dark to discuss this further — only this text actually came
from Emily, who hacked and “mirrored” Jess’s phone after having followed Jess
when she drove out to her old school to talk to Rob. Emily stabs Rob with her
favorite weapon — a knife that looks like the sort of thing you gut fish with —
and leaves him for dead.
Eric and Jess drive out to Emily’s home, where she’s
supposedly living with her grandmother (her mom abandoned her after her dad
died) — only grandma isn’t there, and Eric and Jess discover a past-due bill
from a nursing home and realize Emily has been living alone in a big house all
this time. They enter the house unannounced and start searching for things —
and of course Emily comes home unexpectedly and threatens to kill both of them.
Fortunately, they get the knife away from Emily and save themselves, but unfortunately
she gets away — and in one of those maddening open-ended endings Lifetime is
sticking on all too many of their movies (sometimes, as in the film Lost Boy, in a credible and even moving way; other times,
as here, unbelievable and annoying), Emily, using a different name, is in
another high-school classroom making eyes at the star athlete and offering to
tutor him. Writer Rockoff does offer us an explanation of What Made Emily Run — it seems her mom ran
off with a star soccer player and she never forgave her, so she decided in her
twisted way to seduce high-school soccer players and ruin them — hey, I told
you there was an explanation. I didn’t tell you it would make sense! Aside from a couple of nice topless shots
of Nate Wyatt’s magnificently ripped chest, The Wrong Tutor really has little to offer — and a comparison of Ivy
Matheson’s performance as the psycho here to Ashlynn Yennie’s in an older
version of the same role in The Wrong Mommy is a comparison between an amateur who’s just
beginning to learn to act and a consummate professional who knows how to make
the character live and breathe.
