by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Later in the evening I watched a couple of Lifetime movies
that were part of a series the network was calling “Wrongfully Yours, with
Vivica A. Fox.” I’d always assumed her first name was pronounced “Vye-VEE-kuh,”
but no-o-o-o-o, according to the lady
herself (who was featured in the promo spots for the series) it’s “VI-Vi-Kuh.”
All of these movies have “The Wrong _________ ” in their titles and they’re all
made in Canada by the Hybrid LLC production company. They all — or at least the
two I watched last night — feature Fox as one of the producers as well as an
on-screen actor in a significant supporting role, and they’re all directed by
David DeCoteau from “original” stories (quotes definitely merited!) by Aubrey
Schenck and Peter Sulllivan, though the people who turned the stories into
full, filmable scripts were different: Adam Rockoff on The Wrong
Housesitter (2020) and Matthew Jason Walsh
on The Wrong Student (2017).
Incidentally, imdb.com insists on spelling the title of the 2020 film as The
Wrong House Sitter — two words — but The
Wrong Housesitter is what actually appears
on the opening credits. The Wrong Housesitter begins with the police coming to the home of a tall,
striking-looking corn-rowed African-American man wearing a white shirt with his
nipples showing under the fabric (apparently Hybrid LLC’s casting director
loves nipples on men as much as I do!) and warning him that so far he’s handled
the situation acceptably but they can’t allow him to do anything foolish now.
He’s seeking an eviction order against a houseguest who decidedly overstayed
her welcome — we don’t see her, at least not yet, but we’re told in the
dialogue it’s a woman — and when the police and the homeowner go in she’s left
but she’s written a big graffito message reading, “I’ll Be Back.”
We don’t see
this character again, darnit, though the male lead we do see is just about as gorgeous: he’s Dan Sittell
(Jason-Shane Scott), magazine writer who made a large sum of money for selling
one of his stories to a movie studio and used it to buy his literal dream home to share with his girlfriend Mary (Ciarra
Carter). As far as we have to go to achieve true racial equality in the United
States, it’s still a measure of
how far we’ve come that Dan is white, Mary is Black and that’s not an issue in
the plot at all. Dan is about to
leave town on an assignment to write about some New York developer’s cockamamie
scheme to turn the city’s elaborate network of underground tunnels into a new
community with homes, retail and offices (Robert Heinlein’s The Moon
Is a Harsh Mistress — in which people
realize they can’t live on the
moon, so they set up their colony in
it — in real life!) and she wants Mary to house-sit for him, but Mary, who
works as a consultant for corporations facing major image problems, also has to
go out of town. So he decides to hire a professional housesitter, and as (bad)
luck would have it, the first one he meets is Kristen Turner (Anna Marie
Dobbins), whom he runs into at the City Lights Bookstore — the same set the
Hybrid people previously used in the 2018 movie The Wrong Teacher (about which I commented that they appropriated the
name from the legendary real-life San Francisco bookstore and publishing house,
only the geography of the unnamed city they located it in is flat, unlike the
famously hilly San Francisco) — and decides to hire on the spot when he finds
she’s done that sort of work before. Alas, just before he leaves for his
assignment in New York Kristen has him sign what she tells him is an employment
contract but — though neither he nor we find this out until halfway through the
movie — is really a tenancy contract that makes her a sub-lessee and means he
can’t throw her out for a year. Of course Kristen’s real agenda is to drive Mary out of the picture and claim
Dan for herself, and when she can’t seduce Dan into having sex with her
willingly she drugs his drink while he’s on his couch and then arranges his
body so it looks like they’re
making love and shoots a few selfies of the two of them (supposedly) together.
In case you’re wondering where Vivica A. Fox fits into all this, she plays
Dan’s editor, Debbie DeCroix, who lets Dan use her office to write his piece once
Kristen makes his home life so uncomfortable he can’t work there. She insists
that she has every right to be there — which she does, legally — and she also
completely redecorates his home with stuff she’s got from thrift stores. Mary —
ya remember Mary? — gets delayed
when her assignment stretches out longer than she (or we) expected, which gives
Kristen the chance to tell long-haired nosy neighbor Tracy Bell (unlisted on
imdb.com) that she is Dan’s
boyfriend. Kristen also tells Dan’s editor Debbie that she’s Dan’s girlfriend —
are we really supposed to believe
she’s never met the real one? — which leads Debbie to tell Kristen, “You’re not
at all what I expected.” Of course Kristen has also hired a hunky security
guide named Lance (Jon Sprik) to wire the bedrooms with security cameras so she
can eavesdrop on Dan every time he’s home — including when he wants to make
love with Mary, who draws back not because she knows they’re being watched
electronically but just because she’s nervous about “doing it” when there’s a
third person in the house — and she also grabbed the chance to download the
entire contents of Dan’s phone to the hard drive of her laptop, so when Dan
asks Debbie’s attorney, Brenda Evans (also not listed on imdb.com, though she’s
a heavy-set and rather dykey-looking white woman and she and Debbie put their
arms around each other when they greet, making me wonder if we were being set
up for a plot twist that they were a Lesbian couple) if there’s any way he can
get Kristen out of his house and she finally comes up with something, Kristen
intercepts the call and feeds Brenda a glass of poisoned water, killing her.
Then Kristen strangles that nosy neighbor Tracy and leaves her body in Dan’s
bed, though oddly the cops do not
suspect Dan of the murder (I thought Kristen was going to frame him as revenge
for his not being interested in her). Mary, who broke up with Dan when Kristen
showed her the selfies she took of herself and Dan looking like they’d just made love — which they hadn’t —
reconciles with him and the film ends with them finally rid of the Roommate
from Hell … though Kristen escapes, and the last shot is of the exterior of the
City Lights Bookstore, which led me to dread that we were going to get one of
those abominably open-ended endings Lifetime has been partial to lately in
which the last shot we see is the Bad Girl picking up her next pigeon … though,
fortunately, Messrs. Schenck, Sullivan and Rockoff didn’t go there. The Wrong Housesitter is a pretty much by-the-numbers Lifetime movie,
blessed with a genuinely hot, hunky male lead (I especially liked the extreme
close-up shot of one of Jason-Shane Scott’s nipples as he’s shown working out
in his home gym) who for once isn’t
cast as a villain (though that’s actually fairly common in Hybrid’s version of
the Lifetime formula; in their films we don’t immediately think, “What no-good is he up to?” when
we see a sexy guy as we do in movies from other Lifetime producers) but all too
predictable from the get-go and lacking some of the fresh “spins” on the basic
Lifetime formulae we’ve seen from other Lifetime producers and filmmakers.
