Stalked by a Prince (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night at 8 p.m. I watched the latest “Premiere” Lifetime movie, Stalked by a Prince, and if Girl in the Shed was an example of Lifetime at or close to its best, this was Lifetime at or close to its worst. This one hewed closely to the Lifetime formula, which Maureen Dowd once jokingly dismissed as “Pussies in Peril” – in fact it hewed so closely to the formula it was irritating watching it because director Matthew McGuire and his writers (I remembered the name of Shawn Riopelle as one of them) folloewed an all too predictable course through the events of the story. Once again Lifetime failed to provide cast and credits lists in advance so there is no imdb.com page for the film. The only online information I could find was at https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/stalked-prince-cast-list-natalie-hall-others-lifetime-s-thriller-movie, and all that listed was the director and the actors playing the leads, Jonathan Heltz as Prince Stalker and Natalie Hall as his stalkee, New York-based publicist Alyssa Hall.

To add to the irony, the star couple of Heltz and Hall previously appeared together in a Hallmark movie called Fit for a Prince, in which the plot line was straight Cinderella with none of the darker undertones of this one. A fashion designer and a prince simply meet, fall in love and get the proverbial “and they all lived happily ever after” ending. In Stalked by a Prince the first thing we see is a scared young woman running for her life in a baronial estate whose doors are locked from the outside so she can’t get out. At first we think that Our Heroine is the terrified pigeon trying to flee for her life, but later we learn that this is another woman whom the terrifying Prince Jack has lured to his baronial estate with the full intention of torturing and then killing her. Once we realize that this is not going to be one of those Lifetime movies in which most of the running time is a flashback, we next get to meet Alyssa, who works for a New York publicist along with a fellow employee named Rachel. Alyssa and Prince Jack meet at a reception given by a cheap vodka company whom the prince inveigled a large charitable donation from, and he’s obliged to show up even though he’d rather stay at home in his lavish New York hotel room and drink whiskey directly from the bottle.

That’s our first sign that he’s positively demented, and the next sign we get is a phone call from his older and much more “together” brother Timothy asking Jack if he’s taking his meds. Of course he isn’t, and in fact he grabs the pill bottle and makes an ostentatious show of pouring them down the sink (one wonders why he does that, since it’s only an audio, not a video, phone call) to indicate not only that he’s off his meds but he’s feeling just fine about that. Once he meets Alyssa he’s immediately smitten with her – and he also starts cyber-stalking her even before they’ve had their first date. Egged on by her friend Rachel, who thinks it’s absolutely wonderful that an honest-to-goodness prince is interested in her, she agrees to fly back to England with him on his private plane, accompanied by Tepper, his butler/fixer/bodyguard/whatever (who’s to the prince what John Gielgud’s character was to Dudley Moore’s in the original Arthur). Only, as we soon realize, he’s got every room in the entire house bugged, including her bedroom – though he seems to draw back from actually watching her undress – and she soon realizes that she’s stuck in an environment which is so remote, complete with a veritable maze of hedgerows that separates the house from anywhere outside the estate. The prince soon gets to the business of stalking and terrorizing his latest pigeon, though this is a bit complicated because Timothy, his wife and their kids have all invited themselves to the estate as houseguests.

Eventually all the rest of the dramatis personae realize the prince is a psycho killer, and Alyssa grabs a knife from one of the statues of men in armor that line the walls but is quickly overpowered by Prince Jack, who’s got a gun, and he obviously means to shoot her with it until Tepper shoots and kills him, explaining afterwards that his job is to protect the royal family as a whole, not any particular member of it. Aside from having me wonder whether the inspiration was the oft-argued theory that the real Jack the Ripper was a member of the royal family and instead of allowing him to be arrested and tried like a normal criminal, Queen Victoria arranged for him to be either exiled or murdered, Stalked by a Prince was relatively undistinguished. It telegraphed so many of its plot points in advance, and the only even remotely good thing I’d have to \say for it is Jonathan Keltz’s performance as the psycho prince. He reminded me of Murray Fraser, who played the real-life Prince Harry in Lifetime’s (first) TV-movie about him, Harry and Meghan: A Royal Romance (2018); though he was born in New York City he came off as convincingly British, and he had the same kind of disarming charm as Fraser did until the mask came off and we saw what a rotter and a creep he really was. Aside from his performance (and that of the unknown actor playing Tepper, who clearly makes his character’s disgust at having to play nursemaid and fixer to a spoiled brat of a prince), Stalked by a Prince has nothing to recommend it; it’s just Lifetime from hunger, and in my comments about the first Harry and Meghan movie on https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2018/05/harry-and-meghan-royal-romance-crown.html, I actually predicted they’d make this movie and suggested possible titles for it: Psycho Prince, The Perfect Prince, The Wrong Prince, Devious Prince, or The Prince She Met Online.