Monday, May 4, 2020

Psycho Escort, a.k.a. Lies for Rent (Headlong Entertainment, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

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

I wanted to watch Lifetime’s “Premiere” movie at 8 last night, Psycho Escort, and though it wasn’t as crazy as the previous night’s Deadly Mile High Club it also wasn’t anywhere nearly as much fun. This was one movie whose promos made it seem a lot more exciting than it really was: workaholic accountant Diane Cooper (Victoria Barabas — there’s a bad joke just waiting to be made on her last name but I’m not going to make it) is about to be made partner in her firm despite the opposition of Kyle (Max E. Williams), who’s middle-aged, white, has a dick and longs for the days when those characteristics were actually advantages in the job market. But her personal life is nonexistent; her husband died two years ago and she’s raising their son Jake (Jacob Sandler) as a single mom, but the grief is still so strong she sleeps in the guest room because she can’t bear going back to the bed she and her late husband shared. She’s invited to a wine-tasting party at the home of the firm’s managing partner, Garrett (Joseph C. Phillips), but she feels uncomfortable going there without a man. Russell (Donovan Patton, top-billed on imdb.com), her co-worker who obviously has a crush on her, is hoping she’ll invite him to be her date, but she thinks it would be inappropriate to socialize with a co-worker. 

Instead, at the urging of her sister Lori (Kat Fairaway), she logs on to a Web site with the pretentious and portentous name “The Companionship Collective” which offers rent-a-boyfriends for women who need them for social occasions. Under ordinary circumstances that would be a thinly veiled front for prostitution, but this film’s creators — director Monika Lynn Wesley and writers Marcy Holland (whom I’ve heard of before) and Kaila York (whom I haven’t) — don’t give us a yes-or-no answer on that one. Diane’s hook-up from the Companionship Collective turns out to be Miles (Nick Ballard, who’s an O.K.-looking GQ model type but nowhere nearly as drop-dead gorgeous as Marc Herrmann in Deadly Mile High Club — actually he looks like Herrmann will probably look 10 years from now). Miles is an instant hit at the party, where everyone assumes he’s Diane’s new boyfriend, and the fact that he’s able to pose as an instant expert on virtually everything, from wine (he claims his grandfather was a vintner) to golf (he claims to have a 10 handicap and later acknowledges it’s 8), baseball (he shows Little Leaguer Jake some pitchers and says he was scouted for minor-league teams) and social work (he claims he’s a Big Brothers volunteer, and isn’t) just adds to his appeal. For the most part Psycho Escort is a surprisingly dull and slow-moving film — whereas in Deadly Mile High Club we learned almost from the get-go that the Flight Instructor from Hell was a crazy bitch willing to kill anyone she thought was in her way, Miles doesn’t do anything even vaguely “psycho” until about midway through the film, when he kidnaps Kyle and locks him in the trunk of a car. (Mesdames Wesley, Holland and York don’t bother to explain what happens to him after that.) 

Of course he’s got the genuine hots for Diane and wants to make her his permanent partner, and in order to get her to bond with him he tells her that his wife died in a car crash. What he doesn’t tell her is that the two of them were in the car together and the accident happened just after a confrontation in which she announced that she was having an affair and was going to leave him for the other guy, and he freaked out and presumably arranged the “accident” so she would die and he would live, though once again the director and writers don’t nail that down for sure. About the only person who’s suspicious that Miles is too good to be true is Lori, who researches him online and finds the truth about the “accident” in which his wife died. The director and writers throw us an intriguing red herring towards the end — Miles shows up at the ballpark for Jake’s Little League practice and we’re sure, based on innumerable previous Lifetime movies in which if the heroine in peril is a single mom with a kid, the film will end with the bad guy kidnapping the kid and the good girl forced to hunt him down to recover her child, but Jake surprises Diane, her sister and us by returning home unscathed and going off on a sleepover that will at least get him out of the house for the final confrontation between heroine and villain. This happens when Diane decides to play up to Miles — earlier he’s told her his real name is “Peter Dwyer” but that’s just another alias — and pretend to yield to him, only at the crucial moment she pours some caustic chemical from her bathroom into a glass and throws it in his face, then knocks him out. (Of course I couldn’t help but joke that she should offer it to him as a drink and say, “Here, drink this. The President says it will help you get over COVID-19!”) 

The director and writers shot this under the working title Lies for Rent, which would have been more haunting and a better reflection of what the movie is about, though they also did their work so sloppily they might as well have called it Loose Ends for Rent — and the final shot, which is a close-up of Miles in the woods near Diane’s house having come to and successfully escaped, though he’s still in the neighborhood and there’s a chance the police will arrest him (but maybe they won’t and he’ll get away and pull a similar scam somewhere else), is an annoying non-ending all too much of a piece with what’s gone before it. Lifetime did the filmmakers no favors by giving it such a sensationalistic title as Psycho Escort — one would expect that to be a film about an escort who keeps knocking off his or her customers because they don’t want a permanent relationship from him — which sets up sensationalistic expectations the film as it stands doesn’t even try to fulfill. This isn’t an unusually good Lifetime movie and it isn’t a so-bad-it’s-good camp classic like Deadly Mile High Club, either; it’s just mediocre and dull, and while better actors in the leads might have helped — Victoria Barabas never grabs the contradictions in Diane’s character and Nick Ballard never convinces us (the way Anthony Perkins did in Hitchcock’s Psycho, the film that set the template for the killer underneath) that he’s got demons lurking under his nice exterior. If a scene calls on him to be nice, he plays it that way; if he’s called on to be mean, he does that; but he never makes Miles (or Peter, or whatever his name is) come to life as a consistent character.