Beware of Mom (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2020)

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

Last night’s Lifetime “Premiere” movie was called Beware of Mom, though in this case there are two moms, one good and one bad, who are jointly struggling over the soul of a high-school junior named Kylie (Nicolette Langley). The good mom is, of course, Kylie’s real mom, red-headed Tanya (René Ashton — and why she uses what’s usually the masculine form of her first name, I have no idea), who’s been overprotective to a fault since her husband, Kylie’s dad, was killed as a U.S. servicemember in Afghanistan. The bad mom is Anna (Crystal Allen, top-billed), who moves in next door to Tanya and Kylie with her own teenage daughter, Jessie (Monica Rose Betz), in tow. The film actually begins with an opening prologue in which a mysterious stranger in black sweat pants and a black hoodie (not another mysterious stranger in a black hoodie! Lifetime’s addition of this gimmick as part of their cliché bank seems to have been so they can stage murder scenes without giving away the gender of the killer) opens an outside gas tap inside a home and a teenage girl steps into the house, triggering an explosion and killing her. (The explosion is represented by reasonably but not totally convincing CGI: the days in which filmmakers would have built a model house and actually burned it down or blew it up are long gone.)

Though we’re not supposed to know the significance of this scene until much later, once we hear how Anna’s husband died in an “accident” and their other daughter Lisa died with him, it doesn’t take us long to figure out that Anna was the mysterious stranger in the black hoodie, she intended to kill her husband and make it look like an accident, and Lisa was just collateral damage. Since then she’s raised Jessie as a single mom but has made it clear, à la Walk the Line and its spoof, Walk Hard, that she thinks the wrong one of her kids died — a more diabolical spin on the Smothers Brothers’ famous catch phrase, “Mom always liked you best!” Even before Anna starts her long-term seduction of Kylie, Kylie gets busted when a girlfriend of hers talks her into going into a wild party — as wild as a basic-cable channel like Lifetime can make it, anyway — in which college and high-school age kids are mingling and doing underage drinking (out of the obligatory red plastic Dixie cups) — and the next thing Tanya hears, her good little daughter is at the police station, though exactly what they busted her for (especially since she had virtuously refused the offer of a beer from one of the college boys) is something of a mystery. Mom grounds her for two weeks, but she relents one weekend when she’s going to be out of town on business (she makes custom wedding dresses and other costumes for formal occasions, and when she’s not at home we usually see her hunched over a sewing machine) and Anna agrees to look after Kylie for the weekend rather than forcing her to stay at home alone.

Only Anna throws a party for all the local kids, which shocks Tanya when she returns home from her business trip early and sees just what kind of scene she’s let her daughter get involved in with her neighbor. From then on the story turns largely into one of Lifetime’s oddball reworkings of the Faust legend, as Anna becomes a Mephistopheles-like figure leading poor defenseless Kylie into more and more temptations. Anna scores Kylie a ticket to a secret gig by a hot band (though the music we hear from them is the sort of sensitive “singer-songwriter” stuff that was probably popular when Anna’s mom was a teenager and wouldn’t be likely to appeal to a teen of today) whose 34-year-old lead singer invites Kylie up on stage and sings a song directly to her. Then, when Kylie begs off on any more intimate contact than that, she tells the singer she’s only 17 and the singer subsequently sends Anna a text chewing her out for bringing “jail bait” to his gig. Anna also dresses Kylie in hotter clothes than the ones Tanya will let her wear — clothes that turn out to have belonged to Jessie’s sister Lisa (ya remember Lisa?) — and Anna’s mad scheme eventually becomes apparent: she wants to knock off Tanya and effectively adopt Kylie as a replacement for the dead Lisa so she’ll once again have two daughters. Anna manages to influence Kylie enough that she gets disgusted with her own mom and moves in with Anna and Jessie, and Anna also tries to influence Jessie to get Kylie to break off with her real mom once and for all, including bringing up Kylie’s dead dad — which backfires and only bonds Kylie closer to her real mother. So Anna pulls out all the stops, first breaking into Tanya’s clothes shop and killing Renée (Jessica Buda), who’s either Tanya’s friend, business partner or both (the script doesn’t say Renée is part of Tanya’s business but it’s difficult to imagine why she would be at the shop after hours if she weren’t), when she shows up after hours while Anna is vandalizing the place.

She also manages to slip Tanya some poison (she’s gone on a Web site that offers the information about the 10 most common poisons) which gives her a heart attack and sends her to the hospital, and when that doesn’t kill Tanya, Anna sneaks in and screws up her I.V. in hopes of making her croak that way. At the end Anna kidnaps Kylie (thanks to yet another drug she’s slipped Kylie into her hot chocolate) and takes her and her own daughter Jessie to a seedy establishment called the Bloch Motel (I suspect it’s named after Robert Bloch, author of the novel Psycho on which Alfred Hitchcock based his classic film about a psychopathic killer who commits murder in a motel), where — having already killed Renée as well as her former sister-in-law Zoë (Andrea Lee Davis), who’s convinced (rightly) Anna murdered Zoë’s brother (Anna’s late husband) and has been stalking her ever since, looking for evidence she can take to the police, she knocks off the motel manager (Holgie Forrester — that’s a woman, in case you were wondering) when the manager sees Kylie and Jessie trying to flee and innocently asks Anna why one of “her” daughters has her arms bound together at the wrist with duct tape. Tanya traces her daughter and comes upon the body of the motel manager, and of course any sensible person would call 911, both to get an ambulance out there in case the manager (who was literally stabbed in the back) was still alive and to call in the police to help find her daughter and the other girl. Instead there’s a chase scene and confrontation in the desert country surrounding the motel and, as Anna is trying to kill Tanya with her knife, Anna’s own daughter Jessie sneaks up behind her with a tree branch large enough to do serious damage and hits her over the head with it. The blow seemed to me to be strong enough to knock Anna out but not to kill her — and I was actually looking forward to a scene in which the cops would finally arrive and take Anna into custody alive — but no-o-o-o-o, apparently we’re supposed to think Anna is really, most sincerely dead.

Directed by Jeff Hare for the Johnson Production Group from a script by S. L. Heath (this is Heath’s only listing on imdb.com and there’s no indication on their page whether they’re a man or a woman), Beware of Mom is an O.K. Lifetime movie, about in the midrange of their content quality-wise; a more sensitive writer (like Christine Conradt, maybe?) might have made more of the internal conflict of Anna’s daughter Jessie, who would dearly love to have a sister again but is also a thoroughly decent, moral girl who wants no part of her mom’s schemes. The most unusual aspect of this movie is the way Crystal Allen plays Anna: instead of the surface perkiness Lifetime usually gives the villainess when she’s a teenager herself or the matter-of-factness of most of Lifetime’s adult psychos, Allen plays her all fangs out, growling, baring her teeth and leaving no stick of scenery unchewed — much the way most male psychos were played in films before the Robert Bloch-Joseph Stefano-Alfred Hitchcock-Anthony Perkins Psycho revolutionized the depiction of homicidal psychopathology on screen and got us to believe that the innocent-seeming boy-next-door “type” Perkins had played in all his previous movies could really be a crazy killer. While nowhere nearly as nervy as Sarain Boylan in the 2017 movie Mommy’s Prison Secret, who practically threw her amply curvy, sexy body at the screen as a survival weapon and dared us to stop drooling over her and start hating her, Allen is a no-holds-barred screen presence, barely able to maintain the pretense of normality long enough to win the trust of her potential victims. She’s a lot of fun to watch and she does her level best to lift this movie out of Lifetime’s usual rut, but in the end there’s just too much of we’ve-seen-it-all-before in the plotting (even though the writer has no previous credits) for this one to be anything special.