by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched two Lifetime movies in quick
succession, both of them at least a bit better than the usual fare on this
channel. The first was called Black Widow Killer and was rather misleadingly title — imdb.com called it The Black Widow Killer and the whole
title tended to be a “spoiler,” while the imdb.com synopsis gave away the careful
construction of Adrian Langley’s script (he also directed) and the suspense he
maintained until revealing the identity and motive of the killer until the very
end. If you looked up the imdb.com page and read its synopsis before seeing the
film (as I did) it would blow Langley’s surprise ending and make this film seem
a lot closer to the usual Lifetime
formulae than it is. It begins with a car accident that happened 25 years
before the main action (though we only learn the time differential until the
very end; we don’t get the usual
Lifetime chyron reading, “25 Years Later … ”) in which a young man and a young
woman named Shannon are stuck in the middle of the road when the man’s car
breaks down. The driver is under the car trying to fix it and calls on Shannon
to start it and see if it turns over; it doesn’t — and then another car, a black or dark blue SUV, comes crashing into
Shannon’s and her boyfriend’s car and an accident occurs, though we don’t learn
for sure who survived it. The film then flashes-forward 25 years to the
present, when Judy Dwyer (Erin Karpluk) is the deputy mayor of Mill Creek
(we’re not sure where in the U.S. this is but it’s probably New England, since
it’s Christmastime and there’s plenty of snow as well as an old deserted mill on
a small river just outside the town, hence the name). She’s married to the town
sheriff, Steven Dwyer (Ryan Robbins), only he’s in the process of divorcing her
and they have a teenage daughter, Abby (Morgan Kohan), who’s about to graduate
from high school and is quite serious about a young man named Daniel Wilson
(Bradley Hamilton), who’s quite hot (and thank you, director Langley, for
giving us old queens in the Lifetime audience some nice mid-shots showing off
his basket). Daniel’s mother Kendra (Alison Brooks) is the most popular teacher
at Abby’s high school and is also Judy’s best friend and the one she goes out
for cheesecake and wine to complain about the way Steven is treating her in the
divorce — especially since they have to keep working together because they’re
both high officials in Mill Creek’s city government.
Things start coming to a
head when a mysterious stranger starts showing up in town stalking the main
characters and issuing them enigmatic warnings that they’re all about to be
killed unless they move out of town forthwith. Judy eventually identifies the
stranger as Jason Hall (Luigi Saracino), who served a long prison sentence for
the traffic accident we saw earlier but got out 12 years ago. When Kendra
Wilson is found dead in her home — at first the police think it was accidental
but, after the medical examiner (called in from out of town because Mill Creek
is too small to have one of its own) find poisons in Kendra’s system, the
police conclude it was murder and arrest Kendra’s son Daniel for the crime (and
keep him in a jail holding cell for the end of the movie). Judy is convinced
that Daniel didn’t kill his mother — especially since they got along well and
he never reported feeling oppressed or threatened by her — and she’s equally convinced
the mysterious Jason Hall is the real killer. Part of what convinces her is a
series of neatly handwritten notes the various principals in the case,
including Kendra, Steven and Judy herself, reported getting from a mysterious
sender, all gnomic messages about guilt and revenge. Judy’s soon-to-be
ex-husband Steven gets dispatched from her life sooner than expected when he becomes the killer’s next victim, and later Jason is
found hanging from the beam of the town’s one bridge (which, had it been in Madison
County, Clint Eastwood would no doubt have photographed) where the original
accident occurred 25 years ago. The cops assume Jason killed the other victims
and then committed suicide, but Judy deduces that Jason was murdered by the
same person who killed the other two — who turns out to be (surprise!) Shannon
Collins (Karen Cliché, whose name seems to invite bad jokes but who’s actually
quite good in the role). We get another flashback to the accident 25 years previously in which Jason Hall was
the driver of Shannon’s car, while the occupants of the car that ran into
theirs were soon-to-be sheriff Steven Dwyer and his high-school girlfriend
Judy, who eventually married him.
Judy wanted to report the accident to the
police of Mill Creek and accept whatever responsibility and punishment the
town’s legal system handed down, but Steven talked her out of it and eventually
the crime was pinned on Jason and he spent 12 years in prison, while Shannon
remained bitter about that and hatched an elaborate revenge plot involving
killing all the other people in the accident and framing Jason for the crime.
There’s the usual Lifetime confrontation at the end and Shannon is taken into
custody for the murders — including the killing of Alice Evans, the substitute
teacher brought in to take over from the murdered Kendra, only Shannon killed her before she could start the job and assumed her
identity. The imdb.com synopsis gives it away by making it sound like The
Wrong Substitute Teacher: “After the
bizarre murder of her favorite teacher and her mother’s friend Kendra Wilson,
for which Kendra’s son Daniel (Abby’s boyfriend) is the prime suspect, she is
replaced by Alice, a substitute teacher. Her mother Judy starts her own
investigation and she soon unveils Abby’s new teacher’s mysterious and dark
past, but Alice is one step ahead in her evil plan.” But despite the giveaway
in the materials on this movie (and to a certain extent in its very title — Black
Widow Killer certainly implies, if nothing
else, that the killer in the story is a woman!), this is actually an unusually
good thriller for Lifetime, with genuinely Gothic atmospherics (especially in
the nighttime exteriors), good suspense direction by Langley and a
well-constructed script that for once does not lead us almost automatically to the right suspect.
For some reason, imdb.com gives the copyright date of Black Widow
Killer as 2018 and contains two reviews of
the movie (both from people who liked it considerably less than I did), but
Lifetime lists it as a “premiere” for March 14, 2020; was it shown earlier in
Canada, where it was made? Still, it’s a quite good thriller, several ticks
above the Lifetime norm and with a quite good performance by Morgan Kohan as
Abby; she’s electrifying in the role, with charisma to burn, and she’s got
major stardom written all over her if she can just find the right role!
