by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I got to watch
last night’s two Lifetime movies, A Predator’s Obsession and A Deadly Price for a Pretty Face, but if you try to look them up on
imdb.com you won’t find them under those titles since both were changed: A
Predator’s Obsession was
originally called Stalker’s Prey 2
and A Deadly Price for a Pretty Face was originally Model Citizen. As the “2” in the original title
suggests, A Predator’s Obsession was
originally a sequel to the first Stalker’s Prey from 2017, in which Bruce Kane (Mason
Dye, the male ingénue in Lifetime’s adaptation of V. C. Andrews’ Flowers in
the Attic) rescued a
teenage woman named Laura Wilcox (Saxon Sharbano) and her younger pre-pubescent
sister Chloe (Alexis Larivere) from a shark attack at Hunter’s Cove, a small
town presumably in New England if only because that was the locale of Jaws, from which this film steals shamelessly.
(The poster art for A Predator’s Obsession a.k.a. Stalker’s Prey 2 is such an obvious ripoff of the famous Jaws poster it’s a wonder Universal and
Steven Spielberg don’t sue.) Then, of course, Bruce gets romantically obsessed
with Laura, at least in part because she reminds him of a previous girlfriend
named Alison, whom Bruce killed by deliberately speeding when he was driving
and she was in the car, and when the inevitable crash occurred he escaped but
she was killed.
Of course Laura already had a boyfriend of her own, Nicholas
Jordan (Luke Slattery, who for my money was even hotter than Mason Dye!), but
for some reason Laura’s mom didn’t like Nicholas but did like Bruce. The climax of the original Stalker’s
Prey featured Bruce,
having finally
realized that Laura didn’t share his romantic or sexual interest in her,
deciding to get his revenge by feeding her to the local shark — only she was
able to wound him with a harpoon gun and he fell into the water and presumably
got eaten by the shark instead. Stalker’s Prey 2, a.k.a. A Predator’s Obsession (by the “predator” did they mean Bruce or
the shark?) carried over the same writer (John Doolan) and director (Colin
Theys) as the original, and recycled so many of the same plot points it wasn’t
clear whether Messrs. Theys and Doolan thought they were doing a sequel, a
reboot or a remake. They did
get a different actor to play Bruce this time — Houston Stevenson, a
nice-looking blond man but one with a hard enough face we’re suspicious of him
from the get-go (Mason Dye got aced out of the sequel to Flowers in the
Attic, too!) — but they
seemed to be check-marking off the plot incidents and complications from their
original. This time around Bruce is using the alias “Daniel” and his one-sided inamorata is really named Alison (Julia
Blanchard), who’s being raised by her mom and a stepfather who’s never really
established himself with the kids because he’s out of town on business a lot
and he’s hardly ever home.
This time around Alison’s sibling is a younger brother, Kevin (Brayson Goss), instead of a
sister, and Daniel captains a boat that tows kids one at a time on a rubber
ring raft — the other kids are supposed to stand on Daniel’s boat and call out
“Man down!” when the kid falls of the raft, only Kevin gets into trouble
because one of the kids, who’s been bullying him, unties the tow line just as
sharks start approaching. (It’s unclear from Theys’ direction whether there’s
just one shark or two — we see two fins coming out of the water but we only see
one shark, and it’s one of the most blatantly fake digital video effects I’ve
ever encountered.) Alison goes into the water after her brother and nearly
becomes shark food herself, but Daniel rescues the two of them and then
disappears when the media show up because he doesn’t want his picture taken.
This time around Alison’s boyfriend is Carson (Jackson Dockery), and the
casting department did not
make the same mistake they did in the first film of having Laura’s boyfriend be
hotter than her stalker: Houston Stevenson is so much sexier than Jackson
Dockery that if he weren’t such a creep you’d think Alison was trading up.
Instead Daniel kills Alison’s stepfather (through the same speeding-car means
he dispatched the original
Alison in the flashback in Stalker’s Prey) and then kills Carson by suspending him over the water and
then letting him go so he falls into the water just as the local shark is ready
to feed. (There probably aren’t that many movies in which the villain uses
sharks as a murder weapon.) Doolan and Theys use the same ironic plot gimmick
they did in the original Stalker’s Prey of having the heroine’s mother like psycho “Daniel” better
as a boyfriend for her daughter than nice, presumably normal Carson — though we
also got to see Carson
shirtless and when the two men confronted each other, my dirty Queer mind would
have liked to see “Daniel” seduce Carson so “Daniel” could later tell Alison,
“You can’t marry
Carson! He’s Gay! I
know — I’ve had him!”
In the end they have “Daniel” kidnap Kevin — we’ve
already seen through “Daniel” along with Alison and her best friend Rhiannon
(Sarah Wisser), who played the role Gillian Rose played in the original Stalker’s
Prey of the best friend
who stumbles on the truth about the villain but gets herself killed for her
pains (though this time around the best friend is white instead of Black), but
cute little pre-pubescent Kevin still loves and trusts “Daniel” — and there’s a
big confrontation scene on “Daniel’s” boat in which he threatens to kill both
Alison and her mom (he’s kidnapped both mom and Kevin, though Kevin went
willingly with him since he still trusted “Daniel”) by lowering them into the
water and feeding them to the shark, only Kevin stabs “Daniel” with a knife
“Daniel” gave him, and while this incapacitates him he keeps going and pulls a
gun on the other principals until Alison fires a flare gun at him, the flare
sets him on fire and he ultimately takes a header off the boat and into the
water, presumably to be eaten by the shark — or is he? Are Theys and Doolan still trying to keep it ambiguous so they can
do a Stalker’s Prey 3?
A Predator’s Obsession
a.k.a. Stalker’s Prey 2
is quite an O.K. Lifetime movie, and looking at Houston Stevenson (and, less
so, Jackson Dockery) topless is a big part of its appeal, but it seems quite
appropriate that the “collapsible” production company for this film (in
partnership with the ongoing Johnson Production Group) is called “Synthetic
Cinema International,” almost as appropriate a name for a Lifetime producing
company as “Formula Features,” makers of Last July’s Lifetime premiere I
Almost Married a Serial Killer!
