by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Alas, after the warmth and humanity of My Nightmare
Landlord, Lifetime’s next feature, Baby
Monitor Murders, was a return to the
dullness and slovenliness of the network’s usual fare. First off, the title is
risible; it was originally shot under the title The Babysitter, which in one way would have been better but would
probably misled audience members to expect a story about a psycho babysitter
coming into the home of a normal family, ingratiating herself with their child
and plotting to kidnap the kid and/or kill the mother out of the delusion that
she and the father were “made for each other” and anyone who got in the way
deserved to die. Instead of that
set of Lifetime clichés, though, it was the set of Lifetime clichés in which
the innocent babysitter stumbles into a murder plot and starts to become
convinced that the father of the child she’s babysitting may have killed the
mother. The babysitter is Cassie Temple (Natalie Sharp), an aspiring rock
musician — apparently Natalie Sharp has some real-life reputation as a
singer-songwriter in her native Canada, though what we hear of her music (a few
desultory picked-out songs on a guitar and some off-key singing of them) leads
the audience (this member of it, anyway) to think she should give up any
thoughts of rock stardom and settle into a normal job. The fact that Natalie
Sharp doesn’t look like a woman
rock star —she’s heavy-set and if she dyed her long brown hair black and put
all that smoky eye shadow around her eyes she’d be a good choice for a biopic
of former Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders — doesn’t help her
credibility either. Anyway, she was hoping to spend her summer vacation from
college in Los Angeles working in an internship for a big-time music producer,
but at the last minute the funding for it fell through (of course I joked, “He really got sued by a woman for sexual harassment, got
exposed by #MeToo, and had to pay a huge settlement, so you’re luckier that you
didn’t end up working for him!”),
so she’s stuck in the little town in which she grew up and her parents still
live.
Only the quiet little town isn’t so quiet anymore; we’ve seen a prologue
set in twilight in which a woman is being chased through the woods. We don’t
see who’s chasing her but it’s clear she’s in mortal danger, and when the main
part of the movie turns up we find that her name is — or was — Mallory Raymond
(Cassandra Ebner), and her husband Glenn Raymond (Dustin Lloyd), a tall, fierce
redhead with a full beard (unusually for a Lifetime movie, all three of the
male leads have beards), is angry at the police for having done so little to
find her. Then Cassie, Our Heroine, gets hired by Tom Paine (Jon Cor) — they
gave the character the same name as the famous pamphleteer and propagandist for
the American Revolution — and his wife Chloe (Nicole LaPlaca) to baby-sit their
daughter Becca (Emma Oliver). Cassie settles into her new job and Becca takes
to her. So does her dad; though at least this time around writer Emily Golden
and director Danny J. Boyle (an old Lifetime hand) don’t suggest that Tom Paine has the hots for his new,
young, nubile (if a bit on the Zaftig side, especially by today’s standards) babysitter and is willing to
murder his wife for her, they do
have Chloe disappear under circumstances similar to Mallory Raymond’s. The
usual dumb cop, Sheriff Hayes (Blake Stadel), leaps to the conclusion that
Chloe is dead, killed similarly to Mallory, and her husband Tom committed both
murders. Then a seeming deus ex machina comes into the action in the form of Dr. Jim Gideon (Brendan Taylor),
Chloe’s therapist and the sort of tall, lanky, sandy-haired type Lifetime
usually casts as the innocent husband — only when he summons Chloe for a
meeting and tells her that he can’t say what Chloe told him because that would
violate doctor-patient confidentiality, he drops an awful lot of hints against
Tom Paine. The moment Dr. Gideon showed up, all dripping with phony
solicitousness and concern that barely masked his twitchiness, it almost
immediately became apparent (though my husband Charles caught it before I did)
that he’s the real killer, though
his motive doesn’t become apparent until he traps Cassie in his home and locks
her in his basement.
While there she discovers the dead and badly decomposed
body of Mallory Raymond, the still-living (but barely) Chloe Paine, and the
secret, which was that Dr. Gideon (like a number of other therapists in
previous Lifetime movies) got tired of hearing all his married clients talk
about their relationship problems when at least they had relationships, while he was single and came home at
the end of the day to an empty house. What fueled his psychotic rage was Chloe
Paine’s revelation in her therapy sessions that her husband Tom was having an
affair with Mallory Raymond. Dr. Gideon decided that Tom didn’t deserve Chloe
and that he was going to woo her himself, first by offing her husband’s
paramour, then kidnapping her but keeping her alive, and setting Tom up to take
the fall so he’d be either imprisoned, executed or shot to death in one of the
final shoot-outs beloved by Lifetime writers, so he could become Chloe’s husband and Becca’s father. In
the end Dr. Gideon becomes that rare Lifetime villain that’s taken alive rather
than killed, Tom, Chloe and Becca are reconciled, Glenn Raymond (who in some
respects is the most interesting character in the movie and is played by its sexiest actor!) is absolved of the
lingering suspicions that he
killed his wife, and the final sequence shows Cassie driving into Los Angeles
to pursue her music career (though, as I said before, given what we’ve seen and
heard of her “music” before this we really don’t hold out much hope that she’ll
make it to stardom). A product of old Lifetime pros (including two of the four
“executive producers,” Tom Berry and Breanne Hartley) and nowhere near as
interesting as My Nightmare Landlord
(which was made by people new to the Lifetime orbit, even though a familiar
distribution company, Reel One Entertainment, sold it to Lifetime), Baby
Monitor Murders (named for a brief scene in
which the “baby monitor,” an Alexa-like speaker that’s supposed to alert Cassie
if anything is wrong in Becca’s room, gets its wires crossed and we hear an
unidentified male voice plotting something sinister — shades of Lucile
Fletcher’s legendary radio play, later a movie, Sorry, Wrong Number!) is O.K. entertainment and not as embarrassingly
bad or silly as some Lifetime movies have been, but it doesn’t have the
relative emotional richness and compassion of My Nightmare Landlord either.
