by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched two movies on Lifetime: Mommy Is a
Murderer, which had had its “premiere”
showing last Saturday but was rerun Sunday at 6 p.m.; and the new “premiere”
that followed it, Black Hearted Killer. Mommy Is a Murderer was
directed by Lindsay Hartley from a script by Kate Hanyok, and it actually
centers around Karina Harlow (Bree Williamson) and her surprisingly hunky
husband Ryan (Jason Cermak). They’re partners in a store selling handcrafted
items for little girls — he’s a woodworker who makes cribs and kid-sized
furniture, while she designs and sews dresses — and one day a woman named Lena
Colbert (Heather McComb) comes in the store and yields to her daughter Mallie
(Josie M. Parker) to buy her a dress for a school celebration to give Lena a
reading award — only, for reasons that immediately arouse our suspicions, Lena
will let Mallie have the dress but does not want her to participate in the public ceremony at
which the awards will be given because the little small-town newspaper plans to
cover it and a photo could go out online. This action is preceded by a prologue
set five years earlier in which the parents of a kidnapped child, Edith
Whittington, desperately plea on TV newscasts for the safe return of their
daughter.
Though Kate Hanyok apparently wanted to keep the suspense going a bit
longer, the sheer confluence of these events in the movie gives the plot away
almost immediately: Mallie Colbert is Edith Whittington and Lena kidnapped her way back when and has since
raised Mallie as her own. She’s hyper-concerned that Mallie might be
photographed because then the Whittington parents might see the photo online
(now that just about everyone
posts photos — especially photos of cute kids or pets — online) and catch on as
to where their daughter is. What she doesn’t know — and neither do we until
about two-thirds of the way through the movie — is that the Whittington parents
died in an auto accident about two years after their daughter was kidnapped.
Karina starts getting suspicious when not only does Lena want to let her daughter
get her award at the public ceremony, she reacts in a blasé fashion when
there’s an attempt to kidnap Mallie while Karina is working at the store while
trying, at Lena’s behest, to watch Mallie. A strange man with a beard tries to
pull Mallie into his car, Karina comes out of the store and starts yelling at
him, and he releases Mallie. Lena surprises Karina by not wanting to report the attempted kidnapping to the
police; she tells Karina that the man was her ex-husband, Mallie’s biological
father, and she’s hiding from him because he was abusive. Meanwhile, Karina and
her husband Ryan are supposedly trying to have a child of their own, but every
time he makes amorous moves on her she tells him she’s too busy running the
business, or whatever, and it doesn’t seem to dawn on her that if she wants to
have her husband’s baby, she first has to let him fuck her. The main intrigue
of the movie is Karina’s increasing obsession with getting the mysterious
Mallie away from Lena — which leads Lena to call the police on her, demand a restraining order against her, and start a
whispering campaign against Karina among the other parents in town that crashes
Karina’s and Ryan’s business.
There’s the typical Lifetime climax in which Lena
tries to get Karina out of her life — indeed, out of life, period — with a gun;
she wounds the mystery man who was trying to kidnap Mallie (who turns out to
have known Lena two decades earlier when her natural child, Abby, died while
her age was still in single digits, a trauma that supposedly drove Lena crazy
and led her to this preposterous plot to kidnap a similar-looking child and
raise her as her own) but Karina gets the gun away from Lena and kills her (or
am I mixing the climax of this
movie up with the one they showed right after it, Black Hearted
Killer? Lifetime’s penchant not only for
using the same plot devices in movie after movie but showing similarly themed
films consecutively means a lot of the details blur together!). In the end Ryan
and Karina adopt Mallie — they allow her to revert to her original first name,
Edith — and Karina announces to her that she’s going to get a new baby sister
because apparently she has finally
held still long enough for Ryan to impregnate her and conceive a child au
naturel. Mommy Is a Murderer — a title that promises a good deal more trauma for
the kid than it delivers (one wonders how this poor little kid is going to
handle the punishment of having been whipsawed between three totally different
parental environments, and three different versions of her ancestry) — is an
O.K. Lifetime movie. It could have been stronger if screenwriter Hanyok had
made Karina a distant relative of the Whittingtons, which would have explained
why she is so drawn to “Mallie” and so anxious to get her away from Lena — to the
point where she is willing to
kidnap her to get her away from Lena. That would also have made it more
credible that, with her natural parents dead, “Mallie” t/n Edith can so easily
be adopted by Karina and Ryan. It’s pretty good the way it is, but I do resent that the title seems to be a “cheat” and
neither Bree Williamson as the heroine nor Heather McComb as the villainess are
all that interesting as characters or as actresses.
