by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Superman Returns was
short enough — less than two hours, compared to the two hours and 20 minutes of
the original Superman — I was
able to watch the Lifetime movie at 10 p.m., My Daughter’s Psycho
Friend. It was executive-produced by Pierre
David and Tom Berry and produced, directed and written by Michael Feifer, who’s
so continually over-the-top both
in the situations he contrives at his computer and the ways he directs his
actors to play them that during one especially intense screaming match between
two of the characters I joked to Charles, “This is an example of Michael
Feifer’s skill and sensitivity in creating understatement.” Feifer calls his
production company “Feifer Worldwide,” as if to outdo the badness of so many
movies made by studios with “International” in their names, and he has such a
penchant for crediting himself over and over again that I joked one of his
movies will someday bear the credit, “Associate Producer: Michael Feifer, Jr.,
a Michael Feifer Production.” I suspect My Daughter’s Psycho Friend started life under the title The New Girl, since it’s about a “new girl,” Sierra Reynolds
(Taylor Blackwell), who’s from the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado (best
remembered for the mass shooter who attacked a movie theatre showing the film The
Dark Knight Rises — and did so made up to
look like the Joker, indicating that he hadn’t just picked a movie likely to be
popular and offer him an abundance of targets but the Batman mythos was part of his homicidal madness) — Charles winced
when he heard Sierra mention that a movie theatre is one of the town’s
amenities. Only a mysterious incident involving her and a classmate made her a
pariah on social media and forced her and her parents Jeremy (Bradley Snedeker,
who’s a surprisingly hot “daddy” type for the nice-guy father in a Lifetime
movie) and Melissa (Cerina Vincent) to relocate to Los Angeles … where Sierra
almost immediately gets caught in the web of Alexis “Lexi” Cooper (Avery
Kristen Pohl), her racially ambiguous henchwoman Kaitlyn (Lauryn Speights) and
the hard-bitten clique she’s assembled and rules out of fear and a total lack
of empathy or compassion. (Sounds sort of like our current-day President … )
Lexi and Kaitlyn lay down the law early on to Sienna that her ability to have any friends at school will depend on her yielding to
Lexi’s will and doing nothing to
cross her. Lexi is a spoiled rich girl, product of a marriage between a father
we never see and a mother, Jackie (Caia Coley, who’s got a great bod for a
50-year-old and throws her sexuality at the screen; in real life she’s also
Mrs. Michael Feifer and has been for 19 years, and they have a child, though
imdb.com doesn’t mention the kid’s gender or whether s/he is called Michael
Feifer, Jr.) who caught him screwing their nanny, divorced him and got to keep
the house, Lexi and big awards for alimony and child support. Now she spends
her evening at bars drinking and picking up men — there’s a marvelously ironic
scene in which she comes to her daughter’s high school, smashed to the gills
and wearing a tight-fitting black T-shirt with “TRUE LOVE” written across her
breasts — and leaving her daughter alone for weekends. Lexi takes advantage of
this by throwing parties for all the “in” people at her school, complete with
beer (and harder spirits) served in red plastic cups (I questioned why it seems
every Lifetime movie that
features underage drinking at parties has the kids do it out of red plastic
cups, but Charles assures me he sells lots of red plastic cups to customers at his store throwing booze-laden
parties). At one of these parties Lexi, Kaitlyn and Sierra are hanging out
together and Lexi summons the nerdiest boy at the party, Jake Thompson (Sam
Kindseth, who didn’t seem so nerdy to me; he wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous but he was nice on the eyes). Not only does she deliberately
spill a drink on him, she spikes his drink with the “date rape” drug GHB,
intending he’ll pass out and make a fool of himself. It’s worse than that: he
ends up walking into the swimming pool and drowning himself, and by the time
any of the kids there with an actual conscience (which seems to be only Sierra
and Lance, her burgeoning boyfriend, played by Skyler Seymour, who is drop-dead gorgeous) realizes what’s happened and
tries to rescue him, it’s too late.
The police launch an investigation and Lexi
demands that she, Kaitlyn and Sierra make a three-way pact not to cooperate
with the investigation or say anything to “rat” any of them out — Sierra didn’t
actually see Lexi spike Jake’s drink but she saw enough she was able to put two
and two together and conclude she did — and at first Lexi tries to set Sierra
up for the crime by planting the GHB in her locker (she’s sneaked into the
school office where the combinations are stored on file), then when that falls
through she and Kaitlyn lure Sierra into a trap and Lexi clubs her in the back
of the head with a baseball bat, then give her some of the GHB and put her behind the wheel of her
mom’s car (which she borrowed to go meet Lexi and Kaitlyn at an old deserted
spot near a lake — not another
Lifetime movie with a big scene at an old, deserted, out-of-the-way place!) —
and if this script were being written by someone with a stronger sense of
dramatic irony than Michael Feifer (like Christine Conradt, maybe?) it would
have made more of the plot twist that Sierra got herself and her family into
trouble in the first place and forced them relocate by pushing another girl and
causing her to fall and crack her skull, just as she’s now in the hospital
because her own skull was cracked by Lexi’s assault. That’s right: though Lexi
and Kaitlyn thought they had
killed Sierra by clubbing her, drugging her, putting her behind the wheel of
her own car and letting the car roll into the lake, it didn’t sink enough;
fortunately, Sierra came to and was able to open the car door and swim out
before the interior of the car ran out of air under water. She made it to the
shore where her parents were able to trace her through a locator app on her
cell phone (though earlier Lexi had caught Sierra recording their
confrontation, in which she admitted she killed Jake, and Lexi had grabbed the
phone but for some reason had simply left it there, without either taking it or
smashing it: the sort of plot hole Michael Feifer likes to dig for himself),
rescue her and take her to the hospital. Meanwhile, the cops have charged
Lexi’s mother Jackie with serving alcohol to minors — since it’s her home she’s
legally responsible even though she wasn’t there — and she responds by
threatening to throw Lexi out of her home.
Lexi takes care of that by pushing mom off while the two are on the top of a
staircase — earlier we saw her almost do that to Sierra until the football team showed up and acted as a deus
ex machina — and in the finale she shows up
at the Reynolds’ home with a gun, intending to shoot Sierra, after she lures
the police officer the local cops have stationed outside by making a false
police call and getting him to respond to it instead. (She and Kaitlyn pulled
this in the film’s prologue, calling a SWAT team out to respond to a call with nothing real behind it — and the Reynoldses moved into the
house where that happened after the previous residents were so intimidated and
freaked-out by a SWAT team showing up out of nowhere for no real reason that
they left.) My Daughter’s Psycho Friend (a bit of a misnomer because it suggests there’s going to be more of a
focus on Sierra’s parents — as it is, we see a fair amount of her dad but mom
is hardly even there) is actually an above-average Lifetime movie, thanks
largely to Avery Kristen Pohl’s chilling performance as Lexi: though she’s not
as subtle as Sydney Meyer in Remember Me, Mommy? (nor could she be given the over-the-top script
Michael Feifer wrote for her), she’s implacable, cold enough to have sunk the Titanic and absolutely self-centered, rigorously throwing
out of her circle anyone who crosses her or just ticks her off, and gradually
working her way up on the crime scale to murder. The character is a cliché
(though, as I noted above, the United States is currently being run by a
similarly spoiled rich kid with utterly no conscience or empathy) but Pohl
nails it, and Caia Coley’s equally marvelous woman-you-love-to-hate performance
as her mom shows us the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. (One wonders what
the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Michael Feifer is like that he would give
her a role like this.) Despite its ridiculously florid title, My Daughter’s
Psycho Friend is good clean dirty fun and a
reasonably engaging film that gives us a quite nice couple of villains to hate.
