Line Sisters (Big Dreams Entertainment, Swirl Films, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie was Line Sisters, about the Alpha Beta Omega (interesting of writers Jasmine S. Greene and Scott Mullen to pick the first two and the last letters of the Greek alphabet) sorority – all the sisters are Black but it’s unclear whether it’s a sorority at an historically Black college or just a Black sorority at a mixed-race school, maybe because the Greene-Mullen script ignores any reference to the “education” part of “higher education”). For the first half-hour it’s a depiction of a hazing ritual at the sorority, with one pledge, Brianne (Morgan Alexandria), thrown out at the last minute because she’d claimed her mother had been a member of Alpha Beta Omega when she hadn’t been. She’d pledged the sorority twice but hadn’t made it in because it required a final payment she doesn’t have. So the “Fantastic Five” become the “Fantastic Four”: Valerie (LeToya Luckett-Walker), Cassandra (Kierra “Kiki” Sheard), Dominique (Drew Sidona) and Simona (Ta’Rhonda Jones).

The woman leading the initiation ceremony is Jodi, and for the final test, the “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (not one Paul Simon ever thought of writing a song about), Jodi explains that the pledges will merely be required to drink from a chalice containing filthy water from a river. But Simone insists that she wants the “real ABO experience” of swimming to a buoy in the river and back. Jodi protests that the ABO sisters have decided that would be dangerous and have stopped doing it, but Simone insists on going into the water and daring her three colleagues to do so – even though Cassandra can’t swim. Jodi sees Cassandra start to drown and dives into the water to save her; Cassandra survives but Jodi drowns as an apparent accident. The sorority sisters cover up the incident, and the next time we see the sisters it’s 15 years later. Cassandra is going through a hotly contested divorce from her husband Mitch (Marland Burke), and Valerie is her attorney in the case. (She’s also dyed her hair blonde, which makes me want to send a memo to LeToya Luckett-Walker: unless your name is Beyoncé, if you’re a Black woman you aren’t going to look good with blonde hair.)

The four are invited to a weekend party at a lavish mansion which one of them thinks looks too much like a plantation house for her to feel comfortable there. Only mysterious things start happening: the food they’ve ordered for delivery twice turns out to be full of live worms (there’s a funny gag on the part of director Tailiah Breon that the live animals don’t look that different from the noodles they were expecting as part of their order), their kitchen sink is stopped full of bleach water and all their sorority clothes are ruined, one of the girls finds a live rattlesnake in her bed and ultimately Cassandra is locked in the restroom from the outside and ends up covered in piss and/or shit before another woman finally opens the door and lets her out. I guessed well before the movie ended that Mitch, who was seen stalking the girls, was a red herring and the real culprit is … well, having missed the first few minutes I didn’t recall her name but I was thinking, “Oh, it’s going to be the girl who was thrown out of the sorority for lying about her mom,” and indeed that’s who it turned out to be.

Even before the big revelation (which wasn’t a surprise to me) I was disliking Line Sisters because I didn’t like any of the women; quite frankly I was getting tired of them and almost wishing they’d be knocked off one by one à la Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, from which the writers obviously cribbed a lot (notably the mystery surrounding the invitations that bring the characters to the isolated place the villain has chosen for their comeuppance). Instead they’re not only still around at the end but Valerie is shown “one year later” in a maternity ward after she and her husband (whom we don’t see until the final scene) nave their child at last following the usual and quite tired jokes about how she’s become too much the career woman to have a baby. There’s also a tease shot in which we see an orderly pushing a cart through the hospital and at first we’re led to believe it’s Brianne – until Tailiah Breon brings her camera closer and we see it isn’t.

Line Sisters is one of those Lifetime movies that is just too predictable for its own good, and if Tailiah Breon is a woman (I’m guessing that’s her gender even though there is no photo on the imdb.com page for her, or him) she’s not one of Lifetime’s better “finds” for a woman director. And as much as I’ve ridiculed the Lifetime writers for their usual practice of making the Black characters foils for the white villainesses, I have a lot more sympathy for this than for the writers who make Blacks the prime characters but render them so obnoxious and dull I wish they would go back to stories with white protagonists!