by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was a Lifetime movie so mysterious
that it didn’t have an imdb.com page, and the movie sites that did mention it lamented that Lifetime didn’t release the
names of anyone who worked on it
except the two actors who played the leads, Sarah Fisher and Robin Dunne. The
movie was called His Fatal Fixation
and was about the Stalker from Hell, a young man named Spencer Morgan whom
heroine Lily Abrams (Sarah Fisher) had once dated before falling into a more
serious relationship with a young, better-looking and considerably more amiable
man named Jason. Alas, Spencer accosts Lily and Jason while they’re having a
date at a restaurant, giving her a rather crushed-looking lily — which she
refuses — and when they decide that instead of remaining at the restaurant
they’re going to go back to Jason’s place and order a pizza delivered. Big mistake: the delivery person turns out to be
Spencer, who comes in, draws a knife, stabs Jason to death with it and slashes
Lily’s face, leaving a huge and very nasty-looking wound. Lily responds by
pushing Spencer off the balcony, where he lands in a snow drift and is
presumably dead — but the experience has given Lily the Mother of All
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders. She keeps having nightmares in which Spencer pursues
her, and though both she and we are quickly reassured that these are only
dreams, they scare the shit out of her and she’s convinced that somehow Spencer
survived and is still stalking her. So she decides to change her name legally
to “Stella Gordon” and leave town.
She goes to the Infinity plastic-surgery
clinic (their logo is the sideways-eight mathematical symbol for infinity) run
by Drs. Michael Marlon (Robin Dunne) and Brendan Caidin, and Dr. Marlon does
such a superb job on her operation neither she nor we can see where the scar
was before. Since it was established that Lily/Stella was a physician’s
assistant before the incident with her stalker, she advises Dr. Marlon on the
proper care for her and his other patients and impresses him so much with her
knowledge that he agrees to hire her as a temporary replacement when his
current assistant, Joyce (the typical African-American best friend who gets
knocked off early on), goes into the hospital for reasons the writer(s) never
bother to explain. Whatever Joyce has, it’s serious enough that the hospital
has hooked her to a breathing tube — only a mysterious stranger comes into her
room, kinks the breathing tube and asphyxiates her. Dr. Marlon offers Stella
the job of replacing Joyce permanently but without knowing about her past or
that she’s currently taking a psychotropic drug for her PTSD that isn’t
supposed to be mixed with alcohol. We’re also introduced to several other
patients of the Infinity clinic, including a girl with a harelip whom Dr. Marlon
has successfully operated on after she’s been teased at school about it
(Charles suggested that this was a mistake: parents who have access to any
health care at all will have a child’s harelip corrected before he or she ever
goes to school) and a mysterious, sinister figure named Joshua. Joshua is a
burn victim whose face is being reconstructed by Dr. Marlon, who’s just
performed the first of the three plastic surgeries he will need to be normal
again, only the moment we see him with his face wrapped up in bandages like the
Invisible Man’s and are told he can’t speak (he can communicate only by writing
notes, and every time he sees Stella his notepad includes a smiley-face for
her), we know he’s going to turn
out to be Spencer Morgan, the Stalker from Hell.
Meanwhile the Infinity staff
(what’s left of it) goes out for drinks in a wake-style conclusion to Joyce’s
funeral and Dr. Caidin pushes Stella to have a drink — even though she tries to
beg off since she’s not supposed to drink while on her meds. (Dr. Caidin has
seen her take them but assumed she was ripping them off from the clinic’s own
stash instead of taking a legal prescription from a doctor outside the clinic.)
Dr. Caidin finds Stella outside the bar and takes her home so she can sleep it
off — only a mysterious assailant enters Dr. Caidin’s apartment and beats him
almost to death, leaving him in critical condition at the local hospital. While
all this is going on Dr. Marlon is increasingly attracted to Stella sexually —
he offers to take her to dinner even though, as both she and we later learn,
he’s married to a woman named Claire who was his high-school sweetheart and
also a former patient. The marriage has been strained since Claire had an
affair with someone else (whom we never meet), and at one point Dr. Marlon and
Stella fuck in his office. When Claire finds out, the Marlons have an argument
and she stalks out and is nearly killed when the car she’s driving — which is
carefully established in the dialogue as his, not her own — was sabotaged: its accelerator was
tampered with so the car would just keep going faster and faster and she’d be
unable to stop it. So with both his wife and his business partner in the
hospital and his former assistant dead — and with the writer(s) firing one red
herring after another at us (including Danny Hart, the manager of the building
where Stella lives, who has a penchant for letting himself in with his pass key
and also is shown fixing his own car, meaning he could know how to sabotage
one), both Dr. Marlon and the police officer investigating Joyce’s death,
Praxell Davis (a woman with a page-boy haircut and a slim, boyish figure),
conclude that Stella is herself the psycho and the “stalker” doesn’t really
exist.
But we’ve known along that the mysterious patient with the all-around
bandages would turn out to be Lily’s stalker and the person actually
responsible for the criminal assaults on Dr. Marlon’s staff, and there’s a
typical Lifetime climax in which Spencer tries to kill Dr. Marlon with Marlon’s
own gun, which Marlon took out of a safe for protection, and Stella a.k.a. Lily
ultimately grabs the gun and shoots Spencer, though in yet another one of the
open-ended endings Lifetime is increasingly using, he escapes and presumably
could return for a sequel. The tag scene shows Dr. Marlon and Stella
reconciling at the hospital bed of his wife, with Marlon agreeing to keep
Stella on as an employee but also recommitting to his marriage — though there’s
a tag scene on top of the tag scene which hints that Danny Hart, that obnoxious
building manager, might be Stella’s next romantic interest. His Fatal
Fixation is actually a cut above most
Lifetime movies: the director (whose name I scrawled out as “Stuart Anton” but
that could be wrong) has a real flair for suspense and stages the action far
more creatively than a lot of the Lifetime hacks, and whoever plays the stalker
brings the right sort of restraint to the role (though the idea of the psycho
being a superficially nice guy goes back to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and, even before that, to Edgar G. Ulmer’s Bluebeard) that makes him seem all that sinister when he does go off the rails. Though the writers’ attempts to
divert us from the most logical (and obvious) suspect — including a hint
towards the end, as Stella is trying to save her life by playing up to
Spencer’s delusions, that the two are in this together — are simply annoying,
for the most part His Fatal Fixation
is good melodrama and a better than average Lifetime movie. (I’m not sure it
was originally intended as a Lifetime movie; there are at least two points
where the word “shit” is blipped out of the soundtrack, and it’s possible it
was intended for a theatrical release — or maybe TV stations in Canada, where
this was made, aren’t bound by the same ridiculous Puritanical rules as the
ones here.)
