Secrets in the Basement (Sunshine Films, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

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

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie was actually pretty good: Secrets in the Basement, an intriguing title (though the early working title, Designs for Revenge, was even weirder) for a story that despite some weaknesses — particularly three physically attractive but not conspicuously talented actors in the leads — offered good suspense opportunities for director Stanley Rowe and writer G. Y. Cohen. The basic premise is that a young married couple, Delilah (Melina Bartzokis) and Shawn (Nick Cassidy — I have no idea whether he’s any relation to those Cassidys, musical star Jack and his four kids David, Shaun, Patrick and Ryan, but he’s tall and reasonably attractive but not so hot as to confuse Lifetime audiences who expect truly sexy males in their movies to be villains) Brenner, have had to leave Miami (this film was made by the Florida-based Sunshine Films company in association with our old friends, MarVista Entertainment) and seek solace in a smaller beach community in the Sunshine State. The reason they’ve had to do this is that a year earlier something really terrible happened to Delilah (a name so associated with Biblical villainy it’s hard to accept as the moniker for someone we’re supposed to like) in the city and it’s forced her to take psych meds, though it’s only in dribs and drabs that writer Cohen lets us in on just what the catastrophe was. Through their connections with Barbara (Valentina Izzara), an old college friend of Delilah’s who’s now a realtor (or should that be “REALTOR[TM],” with a trademark symbol?), she lands them what appears to be a dream home, a spiky modernistic thing (it reminded me of the famous Richard Neutra house in Hollywood, commissioned by director Josef von Sternberg and later sold by him to Ayn Rand, who naturally told people she had commissioned it) with all modern conveniences and then some.

The “then some” refers to one of what I consider one of the most useless, pointless and potentially counterproductive inventions of all time, a “smart” grid throughout the house so you can simply give it voice commands — turn on the water, turn on the stove, turn on the TV, turn off the lights, run the trash disposal, etc. — and the house will obey. Or maybe it won’t; by coincidence I had been re-reading my notes on the Lifetime TV-movie Tiny House of Terror in which a similar gimmick exists, a software app called “Host” which unsurprisingly turns malevolent, switching the TV on and deciding which programs it wants to show (in Tiny House of Terror the “pussy in peril” was an apparent widow who was forced by her home’s software — and, we eventually learn, the villain controlling it after having hacked it — to watch video of the news coverage of the accident that killed her husband, who had made a ton of money inventing Host in the first place, without any way to shut it off) and at the end locking the doors of the titular tiny house of terror so the heroine couldn’t escape the homicidal maniac out to kill her. Why anyone would want that degree of automation in their home environment is beyond me — it may not be as dangerous as letting your car drive itself and hoping its software is good enough that it doesn’t crash into anything, but at least driving your own car is a burdensome task one can see why people might want to be liberated from it by an electromechanical gadget.

The main plot function of the home’s “smart” software seems to be to communicate text messages to and from the heroine; whenever someone texts her (which is usually either her husband or her friend Barbara), her phone gives her a message that she’s getting a text and asks her if she wants it read to her. The bad guy is the house’s architect, Jay Christo (Micah McNeil), who’s tall, blond, baby-faced and drop-dead gorgeous in the red slacks he seems to wear all the time. He also seems to be both able and willing to let himself into the Brenners’ new home any time he wants, and though at first we’re not sure he’s the same person as the mysterious gas-masked stranger who’s hanging out in the house’s basement (when I saw his full respirator mask I thought, “Isn’t he taking the COVID-19 prevention thing just a little bit too far?”), eventually we realize that he is the gas-masked stranger and he’s using the house’s basement, which doesn’t even exist in the original plans, as a base of operations to give Delilah Brenner the full Gaslight treatment. (In Gaslight the secret base of operations was the house’s attic, and the prey villain Charles Boyer was looking for was a stash of stolen jewels heroine Ingrid Bergman had no idea even existed, but for some reason even though most 1940’s movies are pretty much terra incognita in contemporary culture, the term “gaslighting” has entered the language as shorthand for any long-term organized attempt by one person to drive another person crazy.)

Jay hangs a particularly grim desert-dried skull of some antlered creature in Delilah’s and Shawn’s bedroom (moving the framed photo of the two of them to a different wall to make room for it); stealing her meds (forcing her to make a panicky trip to her pharmacy to replace them) and then replacing them; and ultimately knocking off Delilah’s friend Barbara after Barbara discovers the original plans for the house, which did include the basement the plans officially on file with the government don’t. Jay leaves Delilah alone in the house — her husband Shawn works as a marketing executive for a video-game company and while all this is going on the company is about to “drop” a major new game, so there are a lot of late nights he’s stuck in Miami working while his wife is home alone and vulnerable to the attentions of the creepy architect — and tells her “I’m going out to take care of some things,” said “things” meaning to get rid of Barbara — she’s stumbled onto the truth about the house but is given away by that infernal “smart” feature of the home that reads Delilah’s text messages out loud, so Jay can hear that she’s on to him and go out and kill her (though in fact Barbara flees Jay’s murderous attack but is run down by a passing car as she tries to run) across the street and taken to the hospital, and just when we’re hopeful that she’s merely been injured and rendered temporarily unconscious, we get told that she’s died). About the only Lifetime cliché writer Cohen avoided this time was motivating Jay with lust for heroine Delilah — a place I wished they’d gone if only because a hot soft-core porn scene between Melina Bartzokis and the truly hot Micah McNeil would have enlivened this film considerably!

Instead they went for Christine Conradt’s territory and concocted an at least understandable, if not sympathetic, rationale for What Made Jay Run: in pieces of exposition doled out like eye drops throughout the film’s running time, we learn that Delilah trained in college to be an interior designer, only for her first big project — a Miami apartment building — she agreed to use cheap plastic moldings between the ceilings and the walls. One day the building caught fire and the moldings literally melted, trapping the people inside and causing one unlucky resident to lose access to oxygen for long enough that, while she was ultimately rescued by firefighters, she was left in a persistent vegetative state. Delilah tried to help, even helping pay some of her medical bills, until she got moved from one hospital to another and the new one had an obnoxious Black woman in dark blue scrubs working there who took such an expansive view of medical omertá that when Delilah repeatedly called, the Black woman would tell her that because of “confidentiality” she couldn’t even confirm to someone who wasn’t part of her immediate family whether the woman was even a patient there, much less how she was doing. It doesn’t take much mental effort to figure out how the two plot lines connect: the comatose woman whose injuries were the result of Delilah’s cost-cutting design mistake was Betty Christo, Jay Christo’s wife. The house that seemed to “miraculously” come onto the market for the Brenners was actually one Jay had earmarked for himself and his wife, and when he learned from Barbara (an old friend and frequent business associate of his) that the Brenners were looking for a new home in his small town, he had Barbara sell it to them while at the same time keeping his identity secret and redrafting the plans so it wouldn’t look like the house had a basement. Delilah had enough architectural training to be suspicious; knowing that the property was in a so-called “blue zone,” highly susceptible to flooding, she knew that legally it would either have had to have a basement or the foundation would have had to be on underground stilts.

Eventually Shawn comes home and offers to go to the hospital to see how Barbara (ya remember Barbara?) is doing — it’s when he does that that the Black woman with the form-fitting dark blue scrubs and the devotion to “confidentiality” that verges on insanity tells him (and us), “I really shouldn’t be telling you this, but Barbara passed away” — and when Shawn leaves Delilah pleads with him to take her to the hospital with him. By this time I was wrapped up enough in her plight that I was rooting for him to take her along to get her out of the house in which she’s trapped with the Psycho Architect — but he doesn’t, and by the time he realizes that Delilah is in danger, Jay has emerged from the basement that supposedly doesn’t exist and is trying to kill Delilah by putting a plastic bag over her head so her death will look like suicide. (It’s established that she already tried to commit suicide once before by deliberately overdosing on her meds, though she was able to convince Shawn that that was an accident — and Jay, in the manner of quite a few villains in bad mystery fiction, prattles on endlessly about how people who’ve tried suicide once are far more likely to succeed on their second attempt.) Only Shawn’s sudden arrival leads Jay to take the bag off Delilah’s head; Shawn retrieves a gun from a lockbox but doesn’t realize that Jay took out the clip with live ammunition and replaced it with one with blanks, and after Shawn shoots Jay but doesn’t hurt him any,

Jay stabs Shawn with a kitchen knife, Jay grabs the gun, puts live bullets back into it and threatens to kill both Brenners — only Delilah is able to scare him by telling him she’s set fire to the house, which confuses him long enough that Delilah is able to wallop him with the proverbial blunt object twice and knock him into the house’s swimming pool, where he presumably expires. Though the plot verges on the preposterous (albeit it’s at least somewhat more believable than many other Lifetime movies) and the acting isn’t especially stellar (one wonders what the talent pool of actors available in Florida — as opposed to L.A. or Lifetime’s usual production stamping grounds in Canada — is like), Secrets in the Basement has some good suspense direction and a real sense of the Gothic — perhaps director Rowe saw Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1934 film The Black Cat (also a tale about a homicidally crazy architect) and learned from it that you can do Gothic horror as effectively in a modern, state-of-the-art home than you can in the usual crumbling old medieval pile! Even Bartzokis, who comes off in the beginning as the all too typical stupid Lifetime ninny who seems to deserve everything she gets, takes on a grim determination as the life-threatening perils her character goes through seem to add weight and force to her acting — though Nick Cassidy remains a nice-looking but dramatically inert last-minute rescuer and I really wish Rowe and Cohen had ripped off the ending of Rebecca and, instead of rather anemically killing off Jay in the swimming pool, had shown him going up in flames along with his super-house.