Sunday, April 26, 2020

Killer Prom (NB Thrilling Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

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

It’s 6:05 p.m. on Sunday, April 26 and I just got finished watching Lifetime’s rerun of last week’s Sunday “premiere” movie, Killer Prom — which was actually better than I expected. Directed by Alexander Carrière from a script by Andrea Canning, Killer Prom was not the sort of thing you might have expected (or got from Lifetime’s recent Homekilling Queen) — a psycho teenager so determined to become prom queen at her high school that she’s literally going to take out anyone standing in her way, even if that means murdering her. It actually begins with Hannah Wilson (Megan Vinson), wife of prominent Philadelphia-based heart surgeon Dr. Tony Wilson (Mark Lutz, a drop-dead gorgeous hunk who’s so much better-looking than the lanky, sandy-haired nobodies who usually play innocent husbands in Lifetime movies that for a while I thought he was going to turn out to be a bad guy after all), visiting southern California (we know it’s southern California because we see the “HOLLYWOOD” sign) and going for a boat ride with her cousin Sienna Lawton (Yvonne Zima, top-billed). Only as soon as Hannah gets on the boat Sienna makes clear her intentions: all her life she’s been jealous of Hannah because she landed the hot, rich, professionally successful Dr. Wilson and had two kids — Maya (Erica Anderson), who’s now a high-school senior with her own anxieties about what’s going to happen on her upcoming prom night (even though when the film starts that’s still five months away) and in particular who her date will be; and prepubescent son Luke (Manny Brenda). 

Indeed, Sienna has spent her whole adult life fixated on her cousin and her cousin’s husband’s prom night, at which they actually announced their engagement, and she’s determined to re-create it with herself in Hannah’s place. So she shoves Hannah off the boat and Hannah, who somehow got to be old enough to be the mother of two kids (and, we later learn, to live in a house with a swimming pool!) without ever learning how to swim. Sienna drives the boat away and leaves Hannah to thrash about in the water as best she can, and ultimately drown. From the moment it started with a murder and therefore let us know from the get-go who the villain would be instead of boring us with a lot of long, ponderous exposition the way many Lifetime scripts do, I liked that we were watching a movie whose makers worshiped at the shrine of St. Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock made one whodunit early on in his career — a 1930 British film called Murder! (not a very good movie but worth watching for the performances of Herbert Marshall, Norah Baring and Esmé Percy; some quite creative uses of sound — as far as I know it was the first talkie that featured an actor’s voice on the soundtrack but without their lips moving to indicate that the character was thinking, not actually speaking, those words — and an overall layer of sexual and lifestyle kinkiness that’s quite appealing) — but thereafter he decided that he was going to let the audience in from the get-go on what was really going on and who the good guys (and the bad guys) were, and build suspense from when and how the characters would find out and what would happen to them when they did. 

Though they’re hardly at the level of Hitchcock or the various writers he used, Carrière and Canning followed the same rule of construction: we know from the beginning that Sienna is a psycho bitch who’s determined to replace her cousin in Tony’s affections and take over Hannah’s life, wealth and family, but we’re kept in suspense about whether the characters will find out and do something to stop Sienna in time before she knocks them off. She shows up at Dr. Wilson’s home in Philadephia and, dripping with phony “concern,” says she intends to stay there as long as it takes to put Dr. Wilson’s broken family together. Luke treats Sienna as a sort of female Santa Claus, indulgently spoiling him with toys, a basketball and a reprieve from homework so they can watch a dinosaur movie together, and dad is relieved that there’s someone else in the house to take up the slack now that his wife has died in what he naïvely thinks was an “accident.” The two people in the Wilson household who take a dislike to Sienna are daughter Maya and the Wilsons’ housekeeper, Janet Macturn (Heather Ted Mitchell), Maya because Sienna is already acting like her mom and Maya doesn’t like it, and Janet because Sienna is trying to take over from her in running the house and picking up the kids from school while dad is working. Sienna finds a way to get rid of Janet when she discovers she’s carrying a two-year sobriety chip — she spikes her drink cup with some sort of household cleaner that has the same effect as alcohol and gets her busted for drunk driving while Janet is in the car driving Jake home. 

Though the police department’s breathalyzer malfunctions that night and therefore the cops don’t have an immediate readout of whatever it was Janet had in her system, Dr. Wilson fires her for being irresponsible and having her relapse with his son in her car. Then fate throws Sienna a curveball in the alluring female form of Lauren King (Brianna Barnes), Dr. Wilson’s office assistant, who’s just been setting up a business trip to Dallas on which she’ll accompany him. It’s obvious both to Sienna and to us that Lauren, who’s just been through a breakup with another doctor in Tony’s medical building, is hoping that while they’re alone together on that trip proximity will work its magic and she’ll be on her way to becoming the second Mrs. Dr. Tony Wilson. A few days before the trip, however, Sienna overhears as Lauren decides to go for an early-morning workout at her gym — and Sienna corners Lauren at the top of a staircase and pushes her down, killing her and once again making it look like a simple accident. Meanwhile, Maya is having problems of her own: she wants to go to the upcoming prom with her sort-of boyfriend Jake Davis (Kyle Meagher, one of those pretty little twinks who make a lot of Gay men my age go apeshit but does little for me —frankly, Mark Lutz did way more for me as someone I’d like to dream about!), only Kat Merritt (Madelyn Keys), a bitchy rival of Maya’s at school, gets Jake to invite her to the prom by “spoofing” Maya’s phone and sending Jake a text that she’s not going to the prom and doesn’t mind if he takes someone else. 

Maya denies sending that text and Sienna takes her phone to a young Black friend of hers named Ed (the actor playing him is unlisted on imdb.com but he, too, is way sexier than Kyle Meagher!) who for some reason has the hots for Sienna even though he looks more like Maya’s age. Ed proves that Kat sent Jake the spoof text and gives Maya a screen shot, which leads Jake to dump Kat and offer Maya her dream prom date instead. It’s a dream prom date night for Sienna as well; she’s outfitted both herself and Maya with replicas of the blue dress Hannah wore the night of her big prom date with Tony, and she drugs Tony’s champagne so he’ll fall asleep for a bit and when he wakes up, Sienna will be in his late wife’s prom dress and she’ll be the spitting image of her, which will make him fall in love with her instantly and allow Sienna to take Hannah’s place in Tony’s life. Only Tony has utterly no interest in her “that way,” and when Sienna realizes that she hog-ties him with duct tape and shoves him into the swimming pool in a scene I suspect was at least a partial knock-off of the ending of Sunset Boulevard — especially when, thanks to quick action by Maya and Jake, he’s rescued and the cops arrest Sienna and handcuff her while she’s still babbling about how she and Tony were soulmates. The reason Maya and Jake were able to catch on to Sienna in time is they were able to place a phone call to Sienna’s mother Dorothy (a quite good performance by Lorilee Holloway), who revealed that Sienna had always had a crush on Tony and had been fiercely jealous of Hannah and probably killed her (a possibility the kids hadn’t thought of before). 

As soon as the rented limo Jake got them to drive up to the prom in style pulls up at the venue, Maya realizes that her dad is in danger and tells the driver to take them back to her place, where her dad is bobbing up and down in the pool to get as much air as he can so he doesn’t immediately drown, and Sienna has stabbed Jake in the chest (but, fortunately, nothing fatal or even life-threatening) before he was able to grab her wrist and get the knife away from her. So Sienna ends up … well, probably in a mental institution rather than a prison because (like Gloria Swanson’s character in Sunset Boulevard) it’s hard to imagine she’ll be found sane enough to stand trial for Lauren’s murder (the one she committed in Pennsylvania — there’d be a jurisdictional snarl over trying her for killing Hannah because she did that one in California). Despite some of the usual Lifetime sillinesses — Sienna has an almost supernatural power of being able to overhear whenever anyone is saying anything derogatory about her and, in one lapse that rankled me, Jake addresses Tony as “Mr. Wilson” when he comes to pick Maya up for the prom — surely, especially on a formal occasion like this, he would have called him “Dr. Wilson” — Killer Prom is actually a pretty good Lifetime movie (even though the title is something of a cheat because we never actually get to see the prom). It’s highlighted by an unusually suspenseful story construction and a great performance by Yvonne Zima as Sienna. Yes, I know Lifetime has made a specialty of depicting these sorts of superficially charming psychos, but they’re rarely as well written or acted as this one. Helped by Canning’s unusually (for Lifetime) complex and relatively subtle script (at least as far as the writing of her part is concerned), Zima does an excellent job of making this character believable.