Monday, April 6, 2020

Black Hearted Killer (The Ninth House, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Lifetime’s next “premiere,” Black Hearted Killer, directed by Roxy Shih from a script by Adam Rockoff (the director’s name meant nothing to me but Rockoff has contributed some relatively good scripts to Lifetime before), had one of the weirdest premises ever concocted for a Lifetime movie. So far they have had supposedly “perfect” nannies, teachers, husbands, wives, visiting nurses, physical therapists and babysitters who’ve turned out to be psychos; this one they might as well have called The Perfect Heart-Transplant Recipient. (Ironically, for Easter — a week after showing this film, with its cynical view of heart-transplant recipients — Lifetime is showing A Question of Faith, a reverential treatment of heart transplants with African-Americans as the principals — sort of like Frank Capra doing his cynical treatment of white people in Asia, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, in 1933, four years before he did his reverential one, Lost Horizon.) The establishing premise of this one is that a few years before the action of this film, long-time married couple Juley (Julie McNiven) and Dennis (Jon Abrahams) Cummings lost their teenage daughter Madison in a car accident. But they stipulated while Madison was in a coma and on her deathbed that they would allow any of her organs to be used for transplants, and in the modern-day action a young, rather scapegrace woman named Vera (Kelley Jakle) shows up and claims to have been the recipient of Madison Cummings’ heart.

Vera proceeds to declare herself part of the Cummings “family” — after all, she is (or at least she says she is) walking around with a particularly important organ from the Cummings’ otherwise deceased daughter — and to show up at their home, uninvited, for a party Dennis Cummings is giving for his boss to celebrate his promotion. (He’s in some kind of investment firm — we think — while she’s an interior designer, and between them they make so much money they’ve been able to afford a palatial estate, complete with a huge wood-paneled front door and a big backyard with a swimming pool.) Vera scams $5,000 from Juley, ostensibly to pay for the anti-rejection drugs she needs to survive the transplant, but that arouses Dennis’s suspicions. So does the way she swigs champagne from the bottle at their party (aren’t transplant patients supposed to avoid alcohol, they wonder?) and the needle marks on her arm, which she says are from IV’s she got during the long bouts of care for her transplant but they suspect indicate recreational drug use. When Dennis throws Vera out of the big party and tells her they never want to see her again, Vera mutters, “You’ll be sorry” — and the next thing that happens is their car is vandalized: its windows are smashed in with a baseball bat and two of its tires are slashed. They report it to the police and a detective named Quinn (Clark Freeman) — we’re never told his first name but he’s by far the sexiest guy in the film, which at least for a while had me wondering if he’d turn out to be Vera’s boyfriend and part of her plot, whatever it is — explains that since they didn’t catch her in the act, there’s nothing he can do about it. Eventually the Cummingses try to trace exactly what happened to their daughter’s heart; the head of the agency that arranged the transplant refuses to tell her on grounds of “confidentiality” (or, as I like to call it, “medical omertà”) but her assistant Bethany (Lynn Chen) slips them the information that Vera did not get their late daughter’s heart. Instead it went to a mixed-race couple (he white, she Black) who used it to save the life of their daughter. Vera goes on a murderous rampage and manages to surprise and kill both Bethany (with a bag over her head) and Detective Quinn (by strangling him with what looks like a belt — she’s hidden in the back seat of his car and waited for him to return to give her her opportunity) before going after the Cummingses.

In a Christine Conradtian attempt to give some complexity and at least a soupcon of sympathy to the villainess, we learn that “Vera”’s real name is Rlley Leeds and her twin sister Carrie was killed in the same car accident that knocked off Madison Cummings. Riley blamed both Madison and her mom for Carrie’s death and intends to shoot both Juley and Dennis with the gun she stole from the policeman she killed, and their only choice in the matter is whether she decides to kill them quickly or put them through the same slow, agonizing death Carrie went through. Writer Rockoff gives us the typical Lifetime climax: Riley lures Juley to a big house she’s commandeered for the occasion, with hideous wallpaper that made me think this is what a PRC movie would have looked like if they’d shot them in color, and though Dennis tries to warn her it’s a trap, does Our Heroine listen? No-o-o-o-o, she goes there, Riley overpowers her and looks like she’s about to kill her when Dennis, who has presumably traced her there through a locator app on her phone, sneaks up behind Riley with a tire iron and clubs her unconscious. Dennis is about to beat Riley to death but Juley stops him — a mistake, especially since Dennis leaves the tire iron behind and Riley is able to grab it, smash the Cummings’ car’s windshield (not again!) and threaten Dennis’s life — only Juley was somehow able to grab the gun (ya remember the gun?) and she uses it to shoot Riley dead. Then the cops arrive. Like Mommy Is a Murderer, Black Hearted Killer is an O.K. Lifetime movie, decently acted — though Heather McComb isn’t able to bring the depths to her psycho character some of the other Lifetime actresses who’ve played these “bad girls” have — and effectively staged by director Shih with at least some flair for suspense and Gothic atmosphere. It’s just that the central premise is getting stale for overuse, and as I was writing the above Charles suggested SARS-CoV-2-inspired premises for future Lifetime movies: The Perfect Stay-at-Home Partner and The Perfect Pizza Delivery Guy Who’s the Only Person the Heroine Sees Except Her Kids.