Psycho Sister-in-Law (The Ninth House, Beta Film, Lifetime, 2020)

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

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie was Psycho Sister-in-Law (the working title, Sinister Sister, was already tacky enough but someone at Lifetime thought it needed to be even tackier, possibly to fit it into their “Psycho” series that has already generated one of the silliest titles of all time, Psycho Yoga Instructor). Written and directed by Jake Helgren for The Ninth House and Beta Film, Psycho Sister-in-Law begins with two nearly lookalike young women — both rail-thin and with long black hair — acting in an independent play that at first looks like they’re two of the Three Witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth but turns out to be something more recent. Then, after the performance, one of the women accuses the other of stealing the lead role that should rightfully have been hers but taunts the other by saying she seduced her boyfriend — and the woman who thought she deserved the lead role takes a shard of glass or something and stabs the other one to death. We’re not sure of the point of this prologue until almost the end of this movie, but at least it does show us right off the bat that this striking-looking, rail-thin, raven-haired beauty is not to be trusted.

Lifetime then does one of its chronology jumps and we meet the Downes family: father Gavin (Rod Sweitzer) is some sort of real-estate developer (at least we assume that because he’s made a large fortune from a business that involves not only acquiring real estate but building on it), and his son Nick (Brando Eason, one of the homeliest actors Lifetime has ever cast as a Good but Naïve Husband type — he’s stocky and medium-height instead of tall and lanky, though he’s also got the sandy hair and nondescript features of a typical “innocent” Lifetime male) and daughter-in-law Haley (Andrea Bowen, top-billed and almost as homely as the actor playing her husband!), who’s about to have their first child. There’s another hanger-on at Gavin Downes’ palatial stone mansion in the desert: Callie Hayes (Diora Baird), Gavin’s trophy girlfriend; Helgren doesn’t tell us what happened to Ryan’s mom but we learn that Callie, though half Gavin’s age, was living in his house preparatory to marrying him but hadn’t actually done so when Gavin suddenly and unexpectedly dies in an accident on a construction site. Then, as Ryan, Haley and Callie are all mourning Gavin’s loss, Ryan’s long-lost half-sister Zara (Lydia Hearst, Patty Hearst’s 35-year-old daughter and William Randolph Hearst’s great-granddaughter) — apparently the product of a nonmarital encounter Gavin had before he married Ryan’s mom — shows up and immediately starts throwing her weight around. She’s pissed off that she only got $100,000 in her dad’s will (especially since Callie got $600,000) and, being a Lifetime villainess (whom we’ve already seen commit murder), she starts a campaign to grab the Downes fortune for herself.

She first sets her sights on Turner Stevens (Sterling Jones), the Downes family attorney (one suspects he inherited the job because he’s Ryan’s age or even younger), whom she claims she saw necking with Callie, hinting that Callie was a gold-digger out to grab Gavin’s fortune and either share it with Turner or seduce him into helping her get it. In one of the script’s quirkier scenes, Turner denies Zara’s accusation that he and Carrie were “all over each other” on their way to a dinner date by telling Ryan he’s Gay — they’ve known each other literally all their lives but Turner has never come out to Ryan before. (Turner tells Ryan, “You remember that French guy I brought over a couple of years ago?” Ryan doesn’t, but apparently that was one of Turner’s boyfriends.) Unable to discredit Turner and get Ryan to fire him, Zara sneaks into Turner’s office after hours, catches him working at his computer, and strangles him. Then she tries to hack into the file containing Gavin’s will and rewrite it, only she hears a security person on his way and has to cut things short. Her point is to frame Callie for Turner’s murder and take over as Callie’s godfather, but Helgren throws her a curve ball in the person of Reid (Ryan Carnes), Zara’s ex-boyfriend from Vegas, who demanded half of the share Zara was supposed to get from Gavin’s estate and says a mere $50,000 isn’t going to be anywhere near enough to pay off his gambling debts. Reid starts hanging around the Downes estate and ticking off Ryan, who at one point tells him to put on a shirt — more’s the pity, since Ryan Carnes is the only piece of hot masculine eye candy in this film and not getting to see those gorgeous pecs of his anymore is a real disappointment — only, all too predictably, Reid “gets his” when Zara sneaks up behind him one night when they’re alone, he’s expecting sex but he gets strangulation instead and she’s got another victim on her hands to dispose of and try to blame on Callie.

Ryan is himself injured when, as part of his new job taking over from his dad on whatever the Downes family business is, he’s nearly crushed by a falling beam on a construction site, though he leaves the hospital a day early because he’s getting more and more suspicious of Zara and her real motives. He finds a construction worker’s hard hat among Zara’s possessions, concluding from that that Zara not only caused his injuries but probably killed his dad as well, and during Zara’s days as an aspiring actress in L.A. before she moved to Vegas (and now she’s back in L.A. “seeing” a manager who’s promised to find her an agent and land her parts — and given what we’ve seen of her modus operandi up until now we’re pretty sure she got him to take her on as a client by sleeping with him) she lived with a woman who sees her photo on Ryan’s phone and tells him [spoiler alert! — though if you’ve seen more than about five Lifetime movies in your life the “surprise” reveal isn’t going to be a surprise at all] that the photo on his phone isn’t the real Zara at all. Now we know the significance of that Vegas-set prologue: “Zara” is really a girl named Ronnie who studied the looks and behaviors of the real Zara (Jess Adams), a fellow aspiring actress who called herself “Amelia” because she thought that would be a more “actressy” first name, then knocked her off not because she was jealous of the straying attentions of a boyfriend who probably wasn’t a prize package either but to take the real Zara’s place and impersonate her to grab the Downes family fortune. There’s a bizarre and very Helgren-esque final confrontation scene in which Zara (actually I think we’re told her real name is “Ronnie”!) gets, or appears to get, Haley Downes to agree to kill her husband in exchange for being allowed to live until her baby is born and “Zara” can grab the Downes fortune as the last remaining adult around to raise her. (There’s a lot of odd byplay for a 2020 movie about whether Ryan’s and Haley’s baby is going to be a boy or a girl — Ryan’s dad Gavin, before he’s knocked off, is dead certain he wants a boy because the first-born Downes has always been a son who took over the family fortune — which seems odd because Helgren’s dialogue says Haley has had sonograms done, and those would have revealed her fetus’s gender … unless the Downeses didn’t want it to, and according to the Livescience.com Web site at https://www.livescience.com/45582-boy-or-girl.html, Dr. Stephen Carr of the Prenatal Diagnosis Center at Women and Infants Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, 85 percent of couples do use the sonogram to tell the baby’s gender in advance but a growing number of couples don’t: “[M]ore and more people are telling us they want to wait until the baby arrives to find out the sex,” Dr. Carr said. “It’s the last great surprise left.”)

Psycho Sister-in-Law might have been a more interesting movie if Helgren had thrown a double reversal into his script and had “Zara” and Haley been in cahoots all along to grab the Downes fortune on behalf of Haley’s baby and eliminate the insufferably milquetoast biological Downeses once and for all, but instead it ends about the way we expect, with Haley feigning going along with “Zara”’s plans, grabbing “Zara”’s hand as she’s holding the gun she had trained on Ryan, and of course THEY BOTH REACH FOR THE GUN and Haley gives “Zara” a fatal bullet wound in the stomach. Psycho Sister-in-Law is yet another O.K. Lifetime movie whose entertainment value comes almost totally from the electrifying appearance of the villainess and the sheer venom of the actress playing her: Lydia Hearst (who surely brought to the role an awareness of what it’s like to grow up in a dysfunctional mega-rich family!) is a former supermodel who brings to the part a haunting hourglass figure, well shown off by the skin-tight clothes she wears throughout (including a pair of form-fitting blue jeans that practically become a character themselves!), and a perfectly honed don’t-screw-with-me attitude that communicates both her character’s self-centeredness and her utter unconcern for anyone else (gee, with an attitude like that she could be President!) as well as her ability to manipulate others to her will. She’s a magnificent villain figure — in some ways a lineal descendant of Ann Savage’s character in Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1946 film noir classic Detour (likewise an unscrupulous bitch trying to impersonate her way into an inheritance) — who quite frankly deserved to be showcased in a better story.