Deranged Granny (Imoto Productions, Lifetime, 2020)

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

Last night I watched a Lifetime “premiere” movie that was pretty typical plot-wise but quite a bit better than their norm in terms of the execution: Deranged Granny (well, they’d already done Killer Granny and Psycho Granny, so they were running out of titles for this particular concept), produced for Imoto Productions and with women as both director (Jennifer Liao) and writer (Vicky L. Neal), which helped a great deal. The film opens with couple Ethan (Josh Ventura) and Lucy (Jane Nawartschi) Anders expecting their first baby. Ethan has long been estranged from his mother Barbara (Wendie Malick, top-billed), but she’s come back into his life with a vengeance even though, as Lucy complains, Barbara never took any interest in her until she got pregnant with a son who could continue the Anders (the word means “different” in German, by the way) family line. Only Lucy goes into hemorrhaging in the final stages of her pregnancy and her obstetrician, an Asian-American male named Dr. Howard (Jim Lau), has to make a Solomon-style decision: save the mother’s life or try to keep the baby alive even at the risk of mom’s death? He chooses to save the mother and lose the baby, whereupon Barbara goes into a hissy-fit, insisting on being presented with the baby’s corpse and wrapping it in the knit blanket she had made for her prospective grandson. She also writes “Murderer” in red letters on the windshield of doc’s car -- though earlier director Liao had given us an ambiguous close-up of the doctor appearing to laugh, which for one brief moment made me wonder if Ethan’s and Lucy’s baby had been born alive after all and the doctor was going to human-traffic him, possibly by selling him to a wealthy couple for an underground adoption. Fortunately, Neal chose not to go with that set of Lifetime cliches.)

Then we get a typical Lifetime chyron reading “Three Years Later,” and three years later Ethan and Lucy have broken up over the strains of having lost their baby -- and we never see Lucy again -- while one of Ethan’s friends sets him up with a co-worker of theirs, Kendall Thompson (Amanda Righetti). Kendall not only looks about a decade older than Ethan but already has two kids of her own, 11-year-old Amy (Isabel Gameros) and six-year-old son Bobby (Finnegan Garny). The kids’ father, Calvin Thompson (Dave Baez), is still very much in the picture since he and Kendall have joint custody, and one of the best aspects of Neal’s script is how well it depicts the sheer complexity of so-called “blended families” and the traumas people, especially children, get put through trying to negotiate these living arrangements. But of course the most sinister intrigue is with the character of Barbara (and kudos to the filmmakers, including casting director Lindsay Chag, for using an actress to play Barbara who’s middle-aged and still surprisingly attractive instead of one of the old bags who usually get cast in “grandmother” roles -- though Chag gets docked a few points for casting both men in Kendall’s life with actors who look a decade younger than she; indeed, though Dave Baez is a bit shorter than Josh Ventura and has a full beard, the two men otherwise look strikingly alike and make us wonder if this is Kendall’s one and only “type”) and the well-balanced performance Liao gets out of Wendie Malick in the part.

She gets a few of the eye-rolling, arm-waving, screaming scenes Lifetime writers and directors tend to give their psycho characters (especially the female ones), but for the most part she’s beautifully controlled in her interactions with others, and Neal helps Malick out with a script that remains grounded in reality and doesn’t throw the kinds of unbelievable coincidences a lot of lesser Lifetime scribes use (though one hole she leaves unexplained is where Barbara’s money comes from -- she’s obviously well-to-do even though she also has a history of mental illness, which at least in this country tends to impoverish people). Malick’s best scene occurs in Barbara’s kitchen, when she's decided to poison Kendall’s ex-husband Calvin for having accepted a job promotion that will require him to move to Boston, and his resulting request to have custody of Amy and Bobby for the three summer months they’re not in school. She makes an apple pie and spikes it with rat poison, and does so with the cheery indifference of a particularly demented contestant in the Pillsbury Bake-Off in a scene that reminded me of Lily Tomlin’s crazy fantasy of doing in her abusive boss in Nine to Five.

Barbara also mounts a major charm offensive to win the allegiance of Kendall’s children even though she’s no biological relation to them at all, and it works -- they end up liking her a lot better than either their mom or their stepdad-to-be -- and it’s not until the very end of the movie that she ends up losing her sang-froid and going after Kendall with a gun just as Kendall is about to call 911 and report her to the police. Barbara orders Kendall to drop her phone, which she does, but fortunately the phone remains on and the police dispatcher hears enough to learn of the emergency and trace the call to Kendall’s address, whereupon they get Barbara to drop her gun and take her into custody. The final tag scene shows Ethan and Kendall married and with a newborn daughter of their own -- she found out she was pregnant before the final confrontation with Barbara -- and Barbara in a mental hospital knitting a blanket for her first biological grandchild while a tough-looking butch African-American nurse says, “She’s really going to like that.”

Though Neal’s plot trods along a pretty well-established Lifetime pathway, at least it makes more sense than most of their movies -- and Liao’s direction not only gets good and multi-faceted performances from his actors, it features creative camera angles that propel us into the action and achieve some at least quasi-noir effects appropriate to the story. Deranged Granny isn’t great (and that typically dorky Lifetime title doesn’t help), but it’s done with real distinction and flair and stands several cuts above the Lifetime norm.