by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Alas, after the surprising quality of Maternal Secrets Lifetime reverted to its formula at its most
slovenly in The Wrong Stepmother,
made in 2019 and apparently followed up with a 2020 film called The
Wrong Stepfather. This time the production
company (Hybrid LLC) and team (director David DeCoteau, story writers Jeffrey Schenck
and Peter Sullivan — though the person who turned their story into an actual
script, Michael Varrati, is a new one on me — and a list of eight “producers”
including DeCoteau, Schenck, Sullivan and Vivica A. Fox, who’s also in the movie in the minor role of, you guessed it, a
school principal) are familiar Lifetime hands, and so is the story. Michael S.
(Corin Nemec, who was born in 1971, had a teen-idol career as Corky Nemec in
the late 1980’s and according to his imdb.com page has worked steadily ever
since — he’s still a very
hot-looking man and I spent most of this movie in a fog of lust over him that
helped me through a lot of its silliness) — we don’t get any more of his last
name than that — has been a widower for five years and is raising two daughters,
high-school senior Lily (Calli Taylor) and her younger sister Nicole (McKinley
Blehm), as a single dad when he goes onto a dating app and finds Maddie Sawyer
(Cindy Busby). Like most of the leads in Lifetime’s “Perfect … ” and “Wrong … ”
series, she seems wonderful at first and one rejoices that Michael’s sexiness
has an appropriate outlet at last even though there’s another woman in his
life, his work partner Cynthia (Gina Hiraizumi), and we can’t help but think she would be a more appropriate partner for him and
stepmom for Lily and Nicole, especially since she was a good friend of
Michael’s late wife.
Then Maddie starts getting possessive and throwing her
weight around, acting like she’s already Michael’s new wife and in one chilling
scene confiscates Nicole’s phone because she dared using it during what Maddie
had declared “family hour.” Until then, as in quite a few other Lifetime
movies, the younger sibling had actually liked the interloper and it had been
the older sister who had taken a
dislike to her. Lily teams up with her sort-of boyfriend Patrick (Mitchell
Hoog, who’s a hot little twink even though I found the older, more butch Nemec
sexier — and my twisted imagination thought it would be fun to see Nemec and
Hoog co-star in one of those “Daddy/boy” Gay porn films), who like a lot of
teenage boys in Lifetime movies is an ace computer hacker, and they try to get
the goods on Maddie so Lily can expose her before she and her dad get too close
to each other, like getting married. Michael’s work-wife Cynthia also investigates Maddie’s past and finds that she’s
already pulled this scam before under the name “Claire Sullivan,” as whom she
romanced a well-to-do older man and ruined him financially before the police
caught on to her and she fled. Cynthia traces the previous victim’s nephew
Tyler (Leonardo Cecchi) and gets the story from him — only Maddie follows her
out to Tyler’s place, somehow breaks into Cynthia’s car and strangles her, then
for good measure knocks on Tyler’s door and, when he answers, stabs him with a
knife and thus eliminates anyone who can reveal the secrets of her past.
(Though she’s Asian instead of Black, Cynthia’s demise fulfills a commonplace
of the Lifetime formula: the person of color who finds out the villainess’s
true agenda but gets killed before she can tell anybody.)
Only there’s one
loose end Maddie has to take care of later: Lily breaks into Maddie’s place in
search of information and finds the business card for Maddie’s former
therapist, Dr. Cassandra Joy Harris (Tracy Nelson). Lily goes to Dr. Harris,
who says (predictably) that her obligation to maintain doctor-patient
confidentiality (what I call “medical omertà,” after the code of silence that governs the Mafia)
prevents her from talking about a former patient. Dr. Harris is convinced that
Lily is just suffering anxiety issues over the loss of her mother and her dad’s
interest in another woman until
Lily lets slip the identity of the woman her dad is dating, and Dr. Harris
warns her in vague but unmistakable terms that that woman is trouble. Alas,
that’s about the last thing Dr. Harris gets to do, since Maddie shows up with
her trusty knife and kills her. (One wonders why no one seems to notice any of these people missing,
especially Cynthia since she and Michael were co-workers and one would have
assumed he would be anxious about her. One also wonders why the police remain
oblivious to these murders; one would think they’d get reported and some
detective might even make the connection between the corpses and the one person
all three of the victims knew.) There’s also a bizarre plot twist in which
Maddie hacks into Lily’s computer and rewrites her college admission essay from
a memorial to her late mom into a hagiographic depiction of Maddie herself —
whom, you’ll remember, Lily never could stand even before she started racking up her body count — and the
school principal (Vivica A. Fox) gets suspicious and reports it to Michael not
only because the essay wasn’t about what Lily had said it would be about but
“it lacks her usual organization.” The finale occurs at Michael’s home, with
Maddie having picked up Nicole at school even though Michael had left
instructions that no one but he would do that; and when Michael comes home
Maddie is holding a knife to Nicole and demanding that if they want to survive
they’ll have to accept her as Michael’s wife, Lily’s and Nicole’s new mother
and the real power in the
household.
There’s a bit of an attempt to explain What Makes Maddie Run — when
she was a girl her mom committed suicide after her dad left her mom for another
woman, and later dad died too (the script doesn’t say that Maddie murdered dad
but it’s certainly implied that she could have) and Maddie was bounced around
various foster homes until an aunt took her in. Christine Conradt might have
been able to take this tantalizing bit of backstory and make Maddie a figure of
real pathos, but Messrs. Schenck, Sullivan and Varrati couldn’t have cared less
about humanizing their villainess and they left Cindy Busby at sea trying to
bring life to this clichéd character. They also didn’t give us any soft-core
porn scenes between her and Corin Nemec, which I would have liked not only for
aesthetic reasons but also to dramatize just what sort of hold she had over him
(the idea that this man could have been taken for an erotic joy ride by a femme
fatale after a lifetime of staid marital
sex and five years of celibacy would have given a richer and kinkier thrill to
this plot and brought it more in line with the classic-period noirs Lucinda Spurling did such a good job of evoking in Maternal
Secrets). Also, I suspect that Cindy Busby
just isn’t as good an actress as Brooke Burfitt; she plays the psycho
acceptably but doesn’t bring her to life as powerfully as Burkitt (acting a
much richer, if equally unbelievable, script) did in Maternal
Secrets. The Wrong Stepmother is one of
those O.K. Lifetime movies that delivers the goods but you know all too readily
in advance where it’s going, whereas Maternal Secrets — as far-fetched as a lot of it was — at least
offers not only surprises but also real pathos and a sense of identification
with the innocent victim’s ordeal far stronger than the hints we get in The
Wrong Stepmother. But it will be
interesting to see how the filmmakers reverse the formula with The
Wrong Stepfather, and how Vivica A. Fox
(subject of a blast from one imdb.com reviewer who wondered how she keeps
getting cast in these things when she’s a one-dimensional actress who plays
everything on just one note … because she happens to be one of the producers!)
will fit herself into it this time!
