by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
There was another Lifetime
“Premiere” on at 8 p.m., and it was Her Deadly Groom, a by-the-numbers production from the teams at
Mutiny Films and Traplight Pictures. Whereas the previous night’s Lifetime
“Premiere,” Stalked by My Husband’s Ex, had got genuinely creative with the formula and improved as its
running time continued, in this one there was no character ambiguity. We know
from the get-go that Vincent Black (Michael DeVorzon, a reasonably hunky but not drop-dead gorgeous guy) is the villain because writers
Jared Cohn (who also directed) and Naomi L. Selfman give us a prologue in which
he’s supposedly honeymooning with his latest spouse when he takes her to a
favorite cliff and suddenly and for no apparent reason pushes her off it. Next
we meet the heroine he’s going to target, Alison May (Kate Watson), who’s
partners in a business making designer peanut butter (I’m not making this up,
you know!) with her friend Brenna (Kelly Erin Decker). The two are having
trouble getting the business off the ground because wholesalers are refusing to
order it on the not-unreasonable ground that there’s nothing distinguishing it
from all the other peanut butters out there, including the ones from major
brands like Jiffy and Skippy.
Alison has also gone through a bitter divorce
with George May (Eric Roberts, who despite his current cragginess and seediness
is still a quite handsome and
charismatic man whom Lifetime persists in casting as creepy villains), who owns
the home Alison and her daughter Nicky (Elyse Cantor) are staying in but has
agreed to let them live there until Nicky goes off to college that fall. Alison
encounters Vincent when her friend and business partner Brenna talks her into
going on a dating Web site and Vincent answers. The two hit it off immediately
and drift into a passionate relationship (though we only get one soft-core porn
scene between them, alas) that within six months seems headed for the altar.
Only in the meantime Vincent has taken out a $2 million insurance policy on
Alison’s life — he did this because he put $50,000 into the business and told
her it was merely partnership insurance — and at the wedding reception Breana
stumbles onto Vincent’s phone and writes down the policy number so she can tell
Alison about it — only Vincent catches her and pushes her down a flight of
stairs. His hope is that she was drunk enough, and unsteady enough on her high
heels, that it will be written off as an unfortunate accident. Earlier we’ve
seen Vincent kill Alison’s scapegrace ex George in similar fashion; it seems
George had hired Vincent to woo Alison so
she’d marry him and therefore George would no longer have to pay her alimony.
Only Vincent had decided that instead of a quickie annulment and a fee from
George, he’d be much better off financially keeping the marriage going, taking
out the $2 million and then killing her for the insurance money. Even before
that we’d seen a creepy scene in which Vincent is in his hovel of a home,
talking to an unseen person whose name sounded like “Waylon” and who turned out
to be someone he’d asphyxiated with a plastic bag over their head. “That’s the
perfect roommate: someone who stays quiet,” he says in the one genuinely witty
line in the Cohn-Selfman script.
When George, before meeting his demise at
Vincent’s hands, throws Alison and Nicky out of “his” home, Vincent invites
them to move in with him in a palatial mansion he’s effectively stolen from the
vacationing couple who rightfully own it by seducing their realtor, Taylor (a
nice performance by Andrea Fletcher) — they’re shown wrapping up a “quickie” in
the house’s kitchen just after Vincent has sworn to Alison that he’s so in love
with her he hasn’t even looked at another woman since they met — and grabbing a phone copy of the key
and noting down the code on the security lock so he can just move in and squat.
When Taylor catches him, he kills her and stuffs her body into her car,
presumably to crash it and make it look like either an accident or a suicide.
With Brenna alive but comatose in a hospital after her fall, the only person in
the dramatis personae is
Nicky’s boyfriend Josh (Jacob Michael, a nice-looking twink who looks enough
like a younger version of Michael DeVorzon one could imagine them playing
father and son), whose father is an ex-con who actually did time with Vincent
and was released at the same time, so he knows Vincent’s real name: Jordan
Wilde. The climax occurs at what’s supposed to be a four-way dinner party at
the mansion with Vincent, Alison, Nicky and Josh — only Vincent spikes Josh’s
medication with a more powerful drug and Josh, who’s had a history of drug
abuse, acts erratically. Vincent corners Josh at his home and force-feeds him
pills to make it look like he used them to kill himself after Alison, figuring
he’d relapsed, forbade Nicky from seeing him.
Only Josh somehow manages to
maintain consciousness and make his way back to the mansion, where Vincent has
invited Alison to take a shower with him, only to bail when he learns Josh is
onto him and needs to be eliminated pronto. Alison decides to take a bath instead but Vincent returns from his
dirty errand with Josh, intent on knocking Alison off once and for all and
collecting his big insurance payday — referencing Hitchcock’s Psycho, I joked, “Alison, never get into a shower with a psycho who talks to dead
people” — only when he returns he ends up in the bathtub while she’s out of it, then throws her hair
dryer in the tub, electrocuting and presumably killing him. (George Baxt’s
pioneering 1960’s Gay-themed mystery A Queer Kind of Death used a similar gimmick: the victim had a radio in
his bathroom and the killer, who turned out to be a partner who wanted to get
rid of him, knocked him off by pushing the radio into the bathtub when it was
connected.) The tag features both Jake and Brenna (ya remember Brenna?) making full recoveries — and Brenna, true to her
man-hungry form, has fallen for Dr. Lin (Carl Chao), who took care of her
during her coma — and Alison profusely apologizing to Jake for doubting him
when he was right about Vincent (t/n Jordan) all along. Then we get one of
Lifetime’s increasingly common — and annoying — endings in which Vincent isn’t
dead at all: he’s in prison but he’s got a female guard staring hungrily and
lasciviously at him and it looks like it’s only a matter of time before he
seduces her into helping him escape. Acceptably directed but indifferently
acted and not especially well cast (except for Andrea Fletcher’s indelible bit
and a walk-on by a cop who shows up to tell Alison that George is dead — though
he’s not listed on the film’s imdb.com page, he’s easily the sexiest guy in
it!), Her Deadly Groom is O.K.
for Lifetime but not especially interesting either dramatically or
aesthetically.
