Her Deadly Sugar Daddy (Cartel Pictures, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

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

Last night’s Lifetime “Premiere” movie -- which may be the last one for a while, given that the next few weeks they’re re-running older movies about murderous cheerleaders and then they’re starting their Christmas-movie reruns in October (which to me makes their channel virtually unwatchable until their sleazy thrillers start up again in January) -- was something called Her Deadly Sugar Daddy, though imdb.com lists it simply as Deadly Sugar Daddy. It had strong similarities to the previous night’s Lifetime “Premiere” movie, The Secret Life of a Celebrity Surrogate, which only showed off how much weaker Her Deadly Sugar Daddy was in emotion, dramatic complexity and filmmaking skill. The director is Brooke Nevin and the writer is Brooke Purdy -- both of them are women, though I had to check their imdb.com pages for that -- but any thought I might have that this might be a more sensitively realized project because of the gender of its creators were pretty quickly dashed. The put-upon heroine who’s going to be stuck with the Deadly Sugar Daddy is Bridget Caprice (Lorynn York), daughter of the late and legendary novelist Lawrence Caprice (he left Bridget’s mom when Bridget was 12 and died a mysterious death -- possibly a suicide -- when Bridget was 16), who moves from Phoenix, Arizona with her friend Lindsey (Aubrey Reynolds) in hopes of making it big as a writer, or at least a paid blogger (this is the 21st century, after all) in Los Angeles. This means that Bridget has abandoned her nerdy boyfriend Zack (Kenneth Miller, who goes through this whole movie clean-shaven and thus looks throughout like the dork he looked like in the end of The Secret Life of a Celebrity Surrogate after he lost the beard he wore through most of that movie -- memo to Kenneth Miller: the beard makes you look a lot sexier!) and also that she’s desperate for a job, especially since the blogging company she interviews for tells her that she doesn’t have an interesting enough life to attract their readers.

Needless to say, the Two Brookes are going to rectify that situation within an act or two: they have Lindsey enroll Bridget on an online dating site without her knowledge, and the first guy she goes out with from that site is a creep named Gerry Garrison (he’s not listed on imdb.com). He and Bridget go to a restaurant, where he puts the moves on her that lead her to walk out of the restaurant because she’s not going to have sex with a guy on their first date -- only he accosts her again outside the restaurant and also hits on her. Fortunately, or at least so it seems at the time, she’s rescued by a white knight, an obviously well-to-do and older but still sexy man named Anthony Glonz (Brent Bailey, top-billed). Before she gets into his car she asks, “You’re not some sort of psycho, are you?” -- to which of course I joked, “I’m a handsome guy in a Lifetime movie! Of course I’m a psycho!” Anthony slips her his business card and asks her to stop by his office to interview for a job as his “executive assistant,” and since he’s offering her $10,000 per month she decides to take the positon thinking it will mostly involve office work and leave her enough time to write. In fact Anthony runs a company that arranges for companies to take over other companies, and in that capacity he’s amassed a formidable lineup of people who “owe him,” including both the police chief and the district attorney of Los Angeles. Bridget finds out that her real job is to go to dinner with Anthony and his clients, all of whom seem to be older men who want to paw her and think they’re going to get to fuck her as part of whatever deal on which Anthony was working with them. Though Bridget somehow manages to make it through the movie without apparently having actually to go through the sex act (albeit the actor playing the L.A. County D.A. is a quite sexy African-American and the Brookes drop a hint that she might have done it with him) either with Anthony’s clients or Anthony himself, she finds herself ih much the same moral dilemma as the heroines of such 1930’s “pre-Code” Hollywood sex tales as The Easiest Way (1931) and She Had to Say Yes (1932). Like them she has to deal with the disapproval (to put it mildly) of the boyfriend from back home -- who moves to L.A. at least temporarily to try to bring her back -- and there’s a scene straight out of The Easiest Way in which Bridget’s mother Jolene (Elise Robertson) comes to L.A. to see her daughter and makes clear her disgust at the way Bridget is living and surrounding herself with at least a few of the finer things in life.

Needless to say, Anthony is a psycho who killed his immediately previous “executive assistant" Michaela and threatens to do the same to Bridget if she ever tries to leave him. He’s also got her place bugged and has sent his own security person, Damon Reclough (Rick Otto), to stalk Bridget’s and Lindsey’s cottage and try to break in so Bridget will be scared out of her own place and agree to stay at Anthony’s. As the film progresses Anthony’s character becomes more and more like Donald Trump’s: obsessed with “loyalty,” constantly reminding Bridget of the nondisclosure agreement she signed to take the job, demanding not only that she take down the blog she started about him (though she hasn’t used any real names, one wonders how his security people could have missed finding it out online), taking the surveillance footage he’s had shot of her with him and his “clients” on their dinner dates (a precaution he’s adopted to give him leverage for potential blackmail if his “clients” try to double-cross him or welch on their deals, but which he’s also used to construct a video that makes look like Bridget really was whoring herself to his “clients” at his command) and even making her smash the cell phone on which she’s taken pictures of potentially compromising documents, including Michaela’s I.D. (She does so with an eagle-shaped statuette that couldn’t help but remind me of the Maltese falcon.) Then he presents her with a new cell phone in an elaborate gold-colored gift box and says, “It was time for you to upgrade anyway.” Eventually Anthony confronts Zack and threatens to kill him if he keeps hanging around Bridget, but Lindsey and Bridget’s mom team up with Zack to get Bridget out of Anthony’s home.

Anthony tells Bridget she has a choice -- either stay with him and be second-in-command of his financial empire as long as she’s suitably “loyal,” or he’ll kill her and use his primo connections with law enforcement to escape any accountability or punishment -- but in the end Anthony is actually arrested for Michaela’s murder and Our Heroine ends up with her twerpy little boyfriend and the dream blogging job she came to L.A. in hopes of getting. Both Her Deadly Sugar Daddy and The Secret Life of a Celebrity Surrogate deal with an innocent young woman taking a job with mysterious rich people (two rich people in Celebrity Surrogate) and finding that her life is literally not her own anymore as they subject her to horrible levels of discipline and control for their own ends -- but somehow the writing in Celebrity Surrogate is a lot stronger and both the heroine and her tormentors come off as far more complex and comprehensible characters than the ones in Her Deadly Sugar Daddy. We never learn much about Anthony Glonz -- either how he made his money or what drove him to his obsessions -- though he’s enough like Donald Trump I mentally gave him Trump’s real-life story (spoiled-brat son of a rich man who likes to portray himself as self-made when he really wasn’t) and thought of a sequel in which he escapes punishment for his crimes and ultimately gets to be President. About the only worthwhile aspect of this movie is Brent Bailey’s performance as Anthony: full of little glare-ice twists in his eyes and subtle changes in his intonations to let us know when he’s being Prince Charming and when he’s being Satan. Both the actor and the character deserved a better showcase than Her Deadly Sugar Daddy!