by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched one of the silliest Lifetime movies I’d
ever seen, Deadly Mile High Club — the
phrase “Mile High Club” refers to people who’ve had sex with other people
inside airplanes while they were actually flying, and I might have guessed it
would be about crooks who board planes looking for people having sex on them
and either blackmailing them or robbing them while they’re otherwise occupied.
No such luck: instead this is the sort of story that if Christine Conradt were
writing it would have been called The Perfect Flight Instructor and if Pierre David and Tom Berry had produced it,
it would have been called Psycho Flight Instructor. (The Lifetime premiere scheduled for tonight is of
something called Psycho Escort,
about a male “escort” who’s hired to do precisely that — hang on the arm of a
high-status woman for a public event to which she doesn’t want to go “stag” —
and he forms an obsessive attachment towards her.) Last night Lifetime was
doing a number of films from their back catalogue —including one I quite liked,
The Madam of Purity Falls — in
which they did the role-reversal of having the males be the innocent victims
and the females the predatory psychos trying to entrap them. The male innocent
victim in this one is Jake Sherman (Mark Herrmann), and both the character and
the actor playing him have hot bods to die for but virtually nothing else to
offer. Jake has been married for six years to Annie Sherman (Anna Marie
Dobbins) but they haven’t had sex with each other at all for the last three
(you’re married to someone that gorgeous and you don’t want to have sex with him? C’mon: if I were
married to Mark Herrmann I’d have a hard time keeping my hands off him ever!) and he’s frustrated not only sexually but also in
his career.
Annie’s mother, Margaret Harris (Diane Robin), who’s the
stereotypical “Jewish mother” even though her funeral (does it really call for
a “spoiler alert” if I let slip that she dies?) takes place at a Christian
church and she has as milquetoastedly Anglo a last name as “Harris,” inherited
a lighting-fixtures business from Annie’s late dad and is grooming Jake to take
it over when she retires even though she has absolutely no confidence in his
overall intelligence or business acumen. Indeed, when she calls him out, says
he has no brains at all and wonders why her daughter could have had her pick of
brilliant, talented and rich men who wanted to marry her but she latched on to
Jake instead. Bored with the lighting-fixture business, a wife who makes him
sleep on the couch at the slightest provocation, and a mother-in-law who makes
Endora from Bewitched look like
Mother Teresa by comparison (though her constant comments on how dumb Jake is
are thoroughly borne out by the script by Doug Campbell, who also directed),
Jake decides to shell out $3,000 from his and his wife’s meager funds to learn
how to fly. Alas, the instructor he selects is Tanya Johnson (Allison McAtee,
top-billed), who in a prologue (which, as in a lot of other Lifetime movies) we
only learn the relevance of well into the story) was involved in a plane crash
that claimed the life of her co-pilot, who didn’t look at all like Jake Sherman
(though the glimpses we get of him in flashbacks indicate that he, too, was
hot, albeit in a Southern California surfer way rather than the GQ model’s good looks of Our Hero) but apparently also
tickled her fancy physically. The moment Jake walks into Tanya’s
ground-instruction session she’s head over heels in lust with him and
determined to win him — and she’s not going to let a little detail like his
having a wife already get in her way. She flies him to Palm Springs after one
of his classes, ostensibly to pick up a package awaiting her but actually to
steer him to a hotel room so they can have sex, but at the last minute (after
Campbell has teased us with the beginnings of a hot soft-core porn scene) Jake
pulls back and says he’s going to stay faithful to his wife (darnit).
Later a
couple of young, nubile women pilots, one of whom is a Black girl named
Penelope (Zephani Idoko) and the other is white and named Daniella (Megan
Elizabeth Barker), steer Jake to a rival flying school run by an acrobatic
pilot named Gonzo Kramer (Damon K. Sperber in what writer-director Campbell
pretty obviously intends as a modern-dress version of a John Wayne role). When
he’s not wowing his would-be students with aerobatics in a beautifully restored
biplane, he’s telling Our Dim Hero that if he wants to learn to fly just to
rent a plane on weekends and take himself around the area, Tanya is fine; but
if he actually wants to make a career in aviation, he needs Gonzo’s training.
Jake accordingly agrees to enroll in Gonzo’s school, only on the day he’s
supposed to start Gonzo is first going to do one of his aerobatic
demonstrations. He wants a passenger along and selects Jake, but Tanya —who’s
present for some reason — pleads with him not to go into Gonzo’s plane. We know the reason, though he doesn’t: we’ve seen Tanya
take a wire cutter to a key control in Gonzo’s plane, so sooner or later he
will lose control of it, it will crash and her rival for Jake’s aviation
affections will be out of the picture. This duly happens — though apparently
nobody at the Federal Aviation Administration or any other agency bothers to
investigate the crash (if they had, one would think it would be easy enough to
determine that Gonzo’s plane was sabotaged) — and later on Tanya racks up another
one on her body count when she offers a plane ride to Margaret Harris and opens
the cockpit door so she can shove the inconvenient mother-in-law out of it.
Just by sheer coincidence Margaret’s body lands in front of a well-known
location for would-be suicides, so the cops and the medical examiner conclude
that Margaret killed herself (why would she?) by leaping out of a building.
(Earlier we’ve seen Tanya push Jake’s wife Annie Sherman out of a plane
similarly — but there’s one of those annoying cut-backs that indicates that was
just a fantasy of hers.)
Later
Tanya has Jake fly over his own house and he sees a woman who looks like his
wife out in their backyard by their swimming pool making out with another guy,
and the belief that Annie is cheating on him leads him to accept Tanya’s sexual invitations at
long last. Only a couple of acts later we learn this is a fake: Annie is able
to read the license number of the car in which she supposedly left with the
other guy, and traces it to the home of a model who was told to go to this
house with a man, make out with him and get photographed from the air. Annie
texts Jake, “Tanya framed me,” and asks him to meet her at their home — only
Tanya intercepts the text while Jake is in the shower after one of their sexual
bouts, and replies to say he’s on her way. She and Jake have already arranged
to flee to Mexico on a Gulfstream private jet Tanya has borrowed from a friend,
and now she plans to dispose of Annie — literally — by capturing her, drugging
her with chloroform, putting her into a cargo box and dumping it out of the
plane in mid-flight. Tanya and Jake take off, and while they’re supposed to be
flying the plane she puts the autopilot on, unzips his crotch and presumably
goes down on him in mid-flight, following which she has him fuck her on top of
the box that, unbeknownst to him but beknownst to us, contains his wife, who’s
tied up and in a locked box but has regained consciousness and is all too aware
not only of what’s happening to her but what her husband and the villainess are
doing at the moment. It’s the kinkiest scene I can think of involving a body
concealed in a box since the two Gay killers in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rope decided to throw a dinner party in their apartment
and serve on a table made from a crate containing the man they’ve just killed.
(By now we’re getting the impression that the fatal crash that killed the other Jake in Tanya’s life was caused by her distracting
him from the task of flying the plane by having sex with him in mid-air.)
Tanya
demands that Jake dump the box over the ocean — she’s giving him the
preposterous story that it contains radio-tracking pellets made by scientists
so whales and dolphins will eat them and the scientists can therefore track
their movements (the fact that Jake falls for this story is yet another
indication of how dumb he is), but just in the knick of time Jake’s wife Annie
(ya remember Jake’s wife Annie?)
figures out how to use one of her keys to unscrew the bolts connecting the lock
on Tanya’s cargo box to its wooden lid. She frees herself and then frantically
tries to wake Jake, whom Tanya knocked unconscious just before bailing out, and
the two of them together are able not only to land the plane safely (even
though Jake has never flown a jet before and Annie has never flown a plane at
all) but radio the local police (it’s unclear whether they’re in the U.S. or
Mexico) to find Tanya where she bailed out and arrest her. In the final tag
scene, Jake and Annie have sold the lighting-fixtures business and used the
money to buy a 1947 Cessna from a man who says the plane was his father’s
before him and his grandfather’s before him — and the way he’s batting his eyes at Jake made me
wish Jake would dump that boring wife of his and end up with the guy who’s
selling him the plane. That could
make for some interesting mile-high antics! Deadly Mile High Club is pretty dementedly silly even for a Lifetime
movie, but it’s the sort of silly movie whose very over-the-topness gives it
entertainment value — especially the absolutely perfect non-acting of Mark
Herrmann, who had my lust-o-meter registering well enough that I didn’t care that he didn’t register any acting talent whatsoever.
Whatever horrible traumas are supposed to be happening to him, his reaction is
the same — to turn to Campbell’s and cinematographer David Dolnik’s camera and look
gorgeous. Allison McAtee is O.K. as the psycho flight instructor (did Jake meet
her online?) but I’ve seen way
better renditions of the Perky Psycho in other Lifetime movies, while Anna
Marie Dobbins as Annie has all the total lack of acting skills as Herrmann
without the drop-dead gorgeous good looks of her co-star. This is one Lifetime
movie that will give the Gay men in the audience a lot more “charge” than their straight brethren.
