by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime movie
was a heavily promoted item called Into the Arms of Danger, which one might have thought was the set of
Lifetime clichés about a young woman who falls for a scapegrace man and only
gradually realizes that he’s, well, dangerous. Instead it followed surprisingly
closely the cliché pattern of Escaping My Stalker, which they’d “premiered” last New Year’s Day and
re-ran last Saturday, and like Escaping My Stalker it was a product of the Pierre David-Tom Berry
pipeline via Blue Sky Pictures and Reel One Entertainment and it followed a
similar pattern despite a different writer — at least I think it was a different writer, since the imdb.com page
on it doesn’t list a writer credit — and director, Jeff Hare. The film starts
with a series of arguments between Jenny Monroe (AlexAnn Hopkins), a young
woman who’s just graduated from high school and is about to start college the
next fall, and her ridiculously overprotective mother Laura (Laurie Fortier).
Jenny goes out to a party with her age-peers and hooks up — non-sexually — with
a hot young man named Drake (Mason Trueblood), who tells her he’s in a band and
he wants her to come out to hear them at a college gig he’s playing the next
night. The gig is a two-hour drive away and it’s already been established that
Jenny’s car has a faulty starter, since she was unable to start it when she was
ready to leave the party and Drake helped her. When she called her mom to tell
her she was having car trouble and would be late, mom demanded to pick her up
and showed up to do so — much to Jenny’s embarrassment.
The next night Mom is
out of town at a conference of medical supply manufacturers (we’re not clear
what Laura does for a living but it appears to have something to do with this field) and Laura decides to drive
out to the college concert to hear Drake’s band — we’re not sure what sort of
music they play but since the night of the party he was wearing a duck’s-ass
hairdo and a leather jacket I guessed they were a 1950’s revival band. Only Mom
insists on calling her to find out where she is, and just after Jenny tells her
Mom goes into a hissy-fit which distracts Jenny and causes her to drive the car
off the road. Mom immediately promises to bail on her conference and pick up her daughter, but Jenny
insists she’s just fine except for a slight concussion when her head hit the
dashboard. She calls 911 and they dispatch an ambulance with an emergency
medical technician team — only they’re not real EMT’s. They’re two brothers,
the nasty Clyde (Sam Meader) and the more innocent-looking and morally
squeamish Guy (Joey Luthman), and while at first I thought they were kidnapping
Jenny for a human-trafficking ring, my husband Charles guessed right. They’ve
been sent on a mission by their mother — who’s referred to only as “Momma” in
the dialogue and, like the principal villainess in Escaping My Stalker, she’s played by a veteran actress who’s been
relegated to less-than-stellar parts by her advancing age but who’s still an
excellent performer. In Escaping My Stalker it was Mariette Hartley; in Into the Arms of
Danger it’s Cathy Moriarty, who is
absolutely compelling as the bonkers mother who sends her sons out to kidnap
young women who vaguely resemble her deceased daughter Lizzie so she can groom
them for a life as Lizzie’s replacement. The film cuts between Laura’s
increasingly frantic attempts to find her daughter and Jenny’s life as the
replacement Lizzie.
Jenny is forced to wear an ankle bracelet that comes with a
remote control so Clyde can administer a painful electric shock to her whenever
she gets out of line — which is quite a lot, given that Jenny wants no part of
her “new life” as the substitute Lizzie. She’s also forced to record what
amounts to a hostage statement, telling her mom that she’s decided to leave
home because she was feeling suffocated and will contact mom if and when she
decides she can — only she adds a John McCain-style reveal, “Tell Dad I said
hello,” since we already know her father is dead (indeed, Jenny attributed her
mom’s new-found overprotectiveness to the death of her dad). Drake (ya remember
Drake?) contacts Laura and
offers his help in finding Jenny, and he makes a copy of the message Jenny left
on Laura’s answering machine (actually it was the tape she recorded at Momma’s
house which one of the brothers took out to a pay phone outdoors and played
over the phone) and does some computer sound-editing that reveals a train going
by in the background. This gives Laura and Drake the clue they need to trace
Jenny to an area on the road from Laura’s home to the college where trains
pass, and the two stumble on the house despite the total lack of help from the
police, who are convinced Jenny is merely a runaway and stress that the
neighborhood is a remote one and the residents don’t like big-city folk
traipsing around and trespassing. Drake tries to get Jenny out after
overpowering Guy (whom Laura previously tried to seduce, hoping his gonads
would overcome his loyalty to Momma and he’d agree to let her out if the two
ran off together, only Momma predictably caught them and chewed out his son for
trying to have sex with “your sister” — also Clyde had at one point threatened
to rape Jenny because he, like Guy, knew full well Jenny wasn’t his sister) but Drake gets caught in a bear trap
(literally!) and this slows him down enough that Clyde catches up with him and
kills him by bashing his head with a rock. (So, just as in Escaping My
Stalker, the filmmakers kill of the
nice young man we were hoping the heroine would end up with; it seems that in
this variation on the Lifetime formula the hot potential boyfriend takes the
place of the doomed African-American best friend in Lifetime movies with older
“pussy-in-peril” heroines.)
The cops finally take the situation seriously as Laura drives up to
Momma’s manse and rescues her daughter from the dreaded “basement” to which
Momma exiled her after her last escape attempt and after it finally penetrated
her twisted head that she wasn’t the real Lizzie — and it turns out that Momma
actually killed the real Lizzie herself and stored her in a freezer chest in
that sinister basement. Jenny is rescued, Momma and the boys are arrested, and
in the final scenes Jenny is shown driving off for her first year of college
with her African-American best
friend Nicole (Noëlle Renée Beacy), who’s going to be her roommate, and Momma
is shown in a mental hospital eyeing the attendant who gives her her meds
because she vaguely resembles the dead
Lizzie. The cleverest part of the script for Into the Arms of Danger is the way Jenny’s life at Momma’s house becomes a
weird, overwrought reflection of her life back home with Laura — Momma ramps up
Laura’s overprotectiveness to absurd levels and, instead of using the story to
tell young women to obey their mothers, it becomes a warning to their mothers
not to ramp up the protectiveness to overwrought levels. In the Arms of
Danger also has fringe benefits
for a Gay male viewer: there are three hot, sexy guys in the cast (Mason Trueblood, Sam Meader and Joey
Luthman) and director Hare gives us plenty of crotch shots on all of them
(thanks!). It’s a better-than-average Lifetime movie but it probably suffered
from comparison with the even better Escaping My Stalker the night before (also a story featuring a
madwoman out to destroy Our Heroine and a boyfriend who gets killed for
stumbling onto the truth of the plot), which in turn had suffered by comparison
with the truly inspired Black Widow Killer which Lifetime showed just before Escaping My Stalker.
