by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Sometimes Lifetime weakens one of their better productions
by showing a not quite as good film on a similar theme right after it, and last
night they did that with a film misleadingly called Escaping My Stalker, a title which doesn’t really do it justice. It’s
actually about a 16-year-old girl who was living on the streets of Los Angeles
(though our only clue to that is a 213 area code on one of the local phone
numbers she asks to be connected to) named Taylor (Ezmie Garcia, who’s actually
quite good and authoritative in the role). Taylor was homeless and forced to
live by her wits on the street (though she’s somehow managed to maintain her
virginity, something homeless teenage girls almost never can do because too
often they’re either raped or turn to prostitution to survive) until she was
picked up (licitly speaking) by a middle-aged couple named Larry (Linden Ashby,
who also directed the film from Stephen Romano’s script) and Sandy (Alexandra
Paul) Stuart. The Stuarts run a homeless shelter downtown but have been so
impressed by Taylor’s survival skills and overall goodness — including her
outreaches to other homeless kids in the neighborhood — they have adopted her and
she’s been living with them for a year. She also has a job working at an indoor
skater park when she meets Clu Dunsten (Pedro Correa), a highly talented
skateboarder whose brother almost turned pro in the sport until he died (the
implication is he went into the military and was killed in combat), a cute,
tousled-haired young man with a disarming manner. They start to date, but
unbeknownst to either Taylor or anyone else she’s been targeted by a mad
killer.
The mad killer is Miles Dyson (Andrew James Allen), and writer Romano
decides to tell us what’s going
on well before the on-screen characters know it. It seems that on the street
Taylor befriended Miles’ brother Randy, only when the Stuarts adopted her she
stopped going to the streets and stopped seeing him, so he killed himself. Both
Dyson brothers were under the total brainwashing and control of their
grandmother Marnie (Mariette Hartley, giving one of those
move-out-of-the-way-and-let-the-old-pro-show-you-how-it’s-done performances
like Ellen Burstyn’s in the Lifetime version of Flowers in the Attic. Marnie Dyson used all the classic brainwashing and
“seasoning” techniques to enslave both her grandsons and make them powerless to
resist her (“seasoning” is what U.S. slave-traders called the process of breaking
the newly captured and transported slaves’ will and getting them to accept
their lot, including their utter powerlessness). In the final confrontation
scene, Marnie boasts of how she brainwashed her late grandson Randy by locking
him in a room without food or light for two months until when she finally
released him, he accepted her without question as his benefactor (though he had
the presence of mind to escape later on and to latch on to Taylor, only to kill
himself when Taylor left the streets to become the Stuarts’ adopted daughter,
for which Marnie blames Taylor) — and she says she’s going to do the same thing
to Taylor: lock her in a dark room without food for two months, then release
her and have her accept Marnie as her lord and mistress — “and then I’m going
to slit her pretty little throat.” I made the Flowers in the Attic parallel and certainly both Romano’s writing of
Marnie and Mariette Hartley’s chilling playing seem to belong much more to the
world of V. C. Andrews than the usual Lifetime formula — even though Pierre
David and Tom Berry are the credited producers of Escaping My Stalker and they have previously supplied a lot of Lifetime’s most blatantly formulaic product.
Escaping
My Stalker is full of plot holes — notably
the whole idea of even the most loving couple, hugely concerned about the fate
of the homeless teens attracted to their shelter program, actually taking the
huge risks of adopting one (two, since a young, cute Black kid, whom we’re told
is 14 even though he has a visible moustache, who helped Larry Stuart after
Miles tied him up and gagged him in his home and Taylor gave him her family’s
address so he could rescue Larry and call 911, also gets adopted by the Stuarts at the end); also how
easily Miles infiltrates the staff at the shelter and he’s even able to plant a
bug in the Stuarts’ office without anybody catching on to him even though his
whole smoldering James Dean act almost seems to scream out, “Watch out! This
one’s dangerous!” I also wished
the character of Clu Dunsten had lasted longer instead of being murdered by
Miles just before the halfway point, not only because he was cute and a nice
counterpoint to Miles’ smoldering evil but offing him seemed the equivalent of
offing the white heroine’s African-American female friend who stumbles onto the
villain’s plot but gets killed for her pains — and frankly I was hoping that he
would make it to the end and become Taylor’s lover. But though I don’t think Escaping
My Stalker lived up to the promise of its
title, and it wasn’t quite as well directed as Black Widow Killer, it was still a quite good, compelling feature
several cuts above the Lifetime norm, and quite haunting in its depiction of
the support structures street people build to help each other survive; the idea
that there is nobility as well as desperation and greed among homeless people,
and they sometimes stab each other in the back but also help each other out at
times, is one we need more of in depictions of them. About the only really
false note I found in this movie is the rather seedy appearance of Alexandra
Paul in one of the parts that’s supposed to represent stability and “normal”
life and sanity — but maybe that had at least something to do with how much she
reminded me, both physically and in her mannerisms, particularly her weird mix
of love and almost suffocating, neurotic protectiveness, of my own mother.
