by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched last night’s Lifetime “premiere,” Killer Dream
Home, which they’d been heavily hyping in
their promos, and after the relative quality of A Deadly Price for a
Pretty Face (a quite good thriller despite
its awful title) the night before, this one was a dreary rehash of the usual
Lifetime formulae distinguished only by two very hot male actors we blessedly got to see with their
shirts off. One was John DeLuca as Josh Grant, the male lead, whom we got to
see a lot of wearing nothing but
gym shorts; the other was Kayvon Esmaili as Ivan, ex-boyfriend of the
villainess, whom she virtually rapes in one scene and sets up her smartphone
camera to take pictures of them “doing it” which she then prints up and
threatens to post online as a form of blackmail. The plot deals with a
spectacular white dream home on Maple Drive in the suburb of an unspecified
major city which Josh Grant and his wife (of five years) Jules (Maiara Walsh)
decide to buy and “flip” even though the previous owner actually died in the
house. The previous owner, it turns out, was a man named Dan Maples who was
running a home-based business from the house and had hired a woman named Morgan
Dyer (Eve Mauro) to work there as his executive assistant — only when he died
(supposedly in an accident, though there’s a prologue scene in which a woman
strangles a man, and while we don’t see enough of them to figure out who they
are, from what we learn in the later stages we conclude that he was Dan and she
was Morgan, who believed he was going to leave her the house so she could stay
there when he croaked. Instead he left it to his wife Beverly (also someone we
never see) and she decided to sell it.
The Grants picked it up intending to
“flip” it — to resell it to a higher bidder after fixing it up — but to do that
they decide it needs an interior redesign to make it more salable. Morgan has a
fake business card printed up claiming she’s an interior designer and puts
together a fake portfolio of rooms she’s supposedly designed but actually
clipped out of home-design magazines. She leaves it at the door of Maple Street
and the Grants pick it up, call her, are impressed by the portfolio and hire
her to redo the home. Only Morgan keeps dropping hints that she’s emotionally
involved in the house — she wants the big room with a bay window (virtually all fancy houses in Lifetime movies these days have big,
prominent bay windows) to be a reading room and resents it when Jules (why do both members of the straight couple at the center
of the action have male names?) wants to turn it into an office for her home-based business instead. Unable to afford to buy
the home herself, Morgan determines to drive the Grants out of it; by claiming
to need a hideout away from an abusive boyfriend she talks them into letting
her move in to the guest house. She also knocks off the gardener, Edgar (Mike
Capozzi), when he recognizes her from her previous relationship (professional and personal) with Dan Maples and wonders what she’s
doing back at the old home. The Grants have several helpers in redoing the
home, including a blonde woman named — I’m not making this up, you know! —
Bliss Leary (Brooke Butler), whom we get the impression dated Josh before he
married Jules instead but has remained a friend of him and befriended the woman
he ended up with instead. There’s also a Gay neighbor named Perry (Jon Klatt),
whom I would have expected to be spending the whole movie drooling with
unrequited lust over Josh but instead is the usual prissy queen; as with most
movie Gays we’re told he’s Gay,
and he’s stereotypically queeny enough we believe it, but we never see him
actually romantically or sexually involved with a man.
The film, written and
directed by old Lifetime hand Jake Helgren (which invites my usual line when I
don’t like a film written and directed by the same person: “The director, who
is also the writer and therefore has no one to blame but himself … ”),
progresses (like a disease) to a typically over-the-top Lifetime climax in
which Morgan goes totally crazy, clubbing Josh and Perry with the butt end of
an ax and strangling Bliss with a red measuring tape in the home’s elevator
(the fact that it had an elevator
was a major selling point), after she’s already knocked off Edgar and Renée
Rivera (Mayra Leal), the realtor (or is that “Realtor®”?) who sold them the
house in the first place because Renée had figured out Morgan wasn’t a real
interior designer and was scamming the Grants. (Renée has an African-American
office assistant whom Morgan also stalks, but she blessedly survives and
escapes the usual — or once-usual; they’ve pretty much backed away from this cliché in recent months — fate of the Black Best
Friend Who Finds Out the Villain’s Plans But Gets Killed Before She Can Tell
Anybody.) Only Jules Grant is able to rescue her husband and the Gay best
friend, and in the end she shoots Morgan dead with a nail gun (a twist my
husband Charles red-flagged when he saw it in the preview: he said a nail gun
does not shoot the nails out like
a real gun shoots bullets, and the only way you could kill someone with one is
to have it point-blank against a vital organ) and the Grants decide to remain
in the Maple Street home and raise their family there — since in the tag scene
Jules informs Josh that she’s pregnant. (Just when they found the time to have sex is a bit of a
mystery.) Killer Dream Home is
O.K. Lifetime entertainment, full of the sorts of people who are so
good-looking they don’t have to
be able to act (I suspect any straight guys watching this were drooling over Maiara
Walsh as much as I was over John DeLuca!) and with costume designer Daniella
Cartun coming up with a series of gloriously over-the-top dresses for Eve Mauro
that did at least as much as Mauro’s acting to tell us she was the bad girl),
but Helgren’s a sloppy director and an even worse writer who has the characters
do so many stupid things (like not
locking their doors, turning their backs to people they know are out to hurt them, and above all refusing to call
the police until they can’t
because the villainess has taken their phones) it’s hard to maintain much
sympathy for them.
