Ruthless Realtor (Fancy Pants Films, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

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

Charles and I watched last night’s Lifetime “Premiere” movie, Ruthless Realtor — the night before they’d done a film about a sympathetic realtor and a psycho architect, so now it was the turn of the real estate profession itself to take its lumps, though as was revealed in a twist ending — it was supposed to be a big surprise but Charles and I have both seen so many of these things we saw it coming at the first hint writer Steven S. Toledo (holy Toledo!) dropped midway through, the “ruthless realtor” turned out a) not to be ruthless at all and b) a well-meaning if rather infuriating character trying to warn the good guys about the real villainess (more on that later). The good guys are young (or at least youngish) couple Ralph (Brian Ames) and Annie (Lily Anne Harrison) Savage. Ralph is an art photographer who shoots pictures of flowers and insects; Annie, a successful divorce lawyer, is the breadwinner of the family; and they stumble on their supposed “dream house” during one of Ralph’s photographic trips in the wilder regions of southern California. They buy the house through a listing from realtor Meg Atkins (Christie Burson, top-billed), only there’s a competing buyer who’s also made an offer: Lynnette Dee (Alexandra Peters), who arranged to buy the house from the bank that had foreclosed on it after the previous owner had mysteriously disappeared five years earlier. Lynnette owns the town pharmacy and complains to Meg that she was supposed to do an off-market sale of the house to her instead of opening the listing to anyone else, but Meg tells the Savages that though Lynnette had more money and looked like a better loan risk, she sold it to the Savages instead because they wanted actually to live in the house instead of tearing it down and building something else on the lot.

Meg soon turns herself into a royal pest, showing up at all hours, demonstrating her lock-picking skills when the Savages ask to see the house’s basement and nobody there has a key, making a brisket for the Savages’ family dinner and bringing it home to them when Annie had a long day at work (which happens often), and even jumping the gun by leaking the information that Annie’s pregnancy test has turned out positive and mounting and framing the pregnancy test and giving it to the Savages as a wall hanging. Also, while showing the Savages the basement — which Ralph decides to turn into his darkroom (though this is the 21st century, he’s so deliberately retro as a photographer he still shoots on film instead of digitally), Meg points to a recently laid wall that covers up … well, she doesn’t know what, but any remotely literate person watching this movie is going to think back to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” and its protagonist Montresor’s dispatching his enemy Fortunato by getting him drunk on the titular liqueur and then walling him up behind a newly constructed brick wall. Like the crazy architect Jay Christo in the previous night’s Lifetime “premiere,” Secrets in the Basement, Meg doesn’t seem acquainted with the idea that a house sale should be final and the buyers may not want the sellers dropping in or hanging out outside at all hours. She also asks Ralph Savage to take promotional portraits of her, which he finally does even though he says he doesn’t do portraits (though he has a fully set up portrait stand in his basement, including lights and a posing stool), and while she’s down in his basement/darkroom/studio she makes a pass at him which writer Toledo and directors Devon Downs and Kenny Gage at first makes us think is reciprocated — but later that turns out to be just Meg’s fantasy and in reality Ralph rejected her and stayed loyal to his wife.

We’ve also been shown an opening scene whose significance we’re not going to learn until nearly the very end, in which a heavy-set man who’s the house’s previous owner is overpowered, drugged and ultimately killed by an intruder with a spray tank, a gas mask and an all-over black hoodie. (The Lifetime gimmick of the mysterious assailant in the black hoodie who chooses that attire so neither the victim nor we can see the killer’s gender has become such an obvious cliché we’re almost certain from the get-go that any attacker so dressed is going to turn out to be a woman.) Meg makes herself so annoying that the Savages twice call the police on her, and a hot-looking but rather hapless Black detective takes the call and the first time refuses to arrest Meg because she hasn’t actually committed a crime. The second time he does take her into custody, only Meg pleads with Annie Savage to visit her in jail by pretending to be her attorney and warning her about the real person who’s endangering them. To no one’s particular surprise (at least no one who’s seen more than five Lifetime movies before), the real culprit turns out to be Lynnette Dee, who’s determined to get that house back because years before, when she was 15, she murdered her parents, the Bradfords (“Bradford” is her true family name and “Dee” merely represented her middle initial), stuffed them into a back room in the basement and did the “Cask of Amontillado” thing to cover them up. (Though she only used stucco and plaster instead of bricks, she still complained about how long it took to dry.) Then she went to live with an aunt and uncle until she turned 18, when she received her inheritance from her late parents and found herself the owner of a drugstore, with access to all sorts of intriguingly dangerous substances.

She made another try to buy the house where she’d grown up, killed her parents and buried them inside the walls, only she got beaten out by a guy named Logan, which she responded to by staging the attack on him in the opening scene, first spraying him with Fentanyl (a powerful opiate first used as an elephant tranquilizer, later turned into a recreational drug by people who really want to live “on the edge”) to incapacitate him (her use of an aerosol drug was the reason she needed to wear a gas mask as part of her murder outfit), then srangling him with a chain and adding him to her collection of corpses in the walls. Lynnette takes out the Black cop surprisingly easily and leaves him fatally wounded in his squad car, and the Savages realize something is up when they encounter him, but do they do the obvious thing — call 911 not only to let the police know that one of their officers is “down” but also to get an ambulance in case he’s still alive and salvageable? No-o-o-o-o: instead they walk into their home and into Lynnette’s trap, as does Meg — Lynnette knocks Ralph unconscious and ties up Annie and Meg, then leaves them alone to get the gun with which she plans to dispatch them permanently, only while she’s gone Meg says she has a way to deliberately dislocate her shoulder to escape her own bonds and then free Annie, and in the resulting confrontation Lynnette gets killed (at least I think she got killed) and the Savages survive but decide to give up the nightmare house and high-tail it back to wherever they were living before — while the cutesy-poo final scene did not show Lynnette having survived after all but Meg showing THAT HOUSE, albeit with a new coat of paint, to a new prospective owner who mentions that he’s a single man, so there’s a hint that after she expressed her frustration to the Savages over her lack of luck in the man department, he’s going to end up not only buying the house from her but sharing it with her.

Ruthless Realtor was considerably better acted than Secrets in the Basement — the four principals are all quite effective and, though Brian Ames is the typical tall, lanky, sandy-haired guy Lifetime likes to cast as the innocent husband, at least he’s genuinely sexy as well, perhaps because the character is considerably younger than usual. He and Annie are about to have their first child instead of being old enough to have had their family already. But the plot is shakier (Charles noted that a couple like the Bradfords, who had money and did an estate plan, would have set up a mechanism to keep up the house payments and property taxes, so it would have never gone into foreclosure; also Annie Savage, an attorney herself, would have known how to get a restraining order against Meg and would have done so) and directors Downs and Gage completely fail to create much in the way of suspense or Gothic atmosphere the way Stanley Rowe did in Secrets of the Basement.