Bound by Blackmail, a.k.a. Dangerous Cult (Cartel Pictures, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night at 8 I watched a Lifetime movie called … well, I’m nolt sure what it was called originally since the Lifetime Web site listed it as Bound by Blackmail but imdb.com listed it as Dangerous Cult – a considerably better title since it’s actually about a dangerous cult – and lists another 2022 TV-movie called Bound by Blackmail with at least one actor, Jade Harlow, appearing in both. This Bound by Blackmail a.k.a. Dangerous Cult begins with a woman named Nicole Miller Ithe aforementioned Jade Harlow) who’s the single parent of a college-age daughter, Ari (Monroe Cline). She’s recruited by a woman named Phyllis Walker to sign up for a series of workshops at a self-help center called Initiative, run by Ken Palmer (Coby McRyan Laughlin) and his brother Justin (Tom Parker – no, not Elvis Presley’s notorious manager). Casting director Paul Ruddy gets kudos from me for finding a pair of actors with striking resemblances to Donald Trump, Jr. and his brother Eric, which seems appropriate for the manipulative slimeballs they’re playing.

Only Phyllis is found dead under mysterious circumstances shortly after Nicole starts course work at Initiative, and while the police rule it an accidental drug overdose Phyllis’s sister Robyn (Austin Highsmith Garces) is convinced that Phyllis, who had once had a drug problem but had been clean and sober for 15 years when she died, either would not have returned to drug use at all or would have called Robyn before she started using again. Though Nicole has already had a falling-out with Ken Palmer, she accepts Ken’s offer of a free Initiative seminar to get back on the campus and find out what happened to Phyllis. She also recruits Robin Walker, a journalist, to commit to writing a story about the cult, and NIcole’s main concern is finding out what hold the cult has on ots members that makes them too scared to leave. Nicole learns that the device that keeps people in Initiative is blackmail: during their “:therapy” sessions everything the people in the room say is being recorded, audio and video, and Nicole is determined to find out where the recordings of the sessions are being stored. Nicole is appalled at the treatment of Initiative member Megan (Taylor Blackwell), who is forced to stand with her arms outstretched for literally hours on end until Ken gives her permission to let them down.

Nicole asks Megan if she’ll be a source for Robyn’s story, but before she can get interviewed for the piece she’s ambushed in a sauna and killed. (Saunas seem to be a preferred method of murder for this cult and its leaders.) Nicole also learns that Bill Hale (Steven Richard Harris), the police detective who was supposed to be investigating the suspicious deaths around Initiative, is actually either a cult member himself or certainly on their payroll, and he’s using his position to cover up for them. Nicole also gets threatening phone calls, and when she stays on the case regardless she’s assaulted as she’s trying to change a tire on her car after one of the cult’s goon squads drives a knife through it. As the film moves towards a climax Nicole sneaks into Ken’s office and finds a group of flash drives, each one labeled with a member’s name, where all the compromising information about them is stored. She’s helped in this regard by a woman named Diane (the quite good actress who plays her is unfortunately not listed on imdb.com, though she delivers the most chilling performance in the film), though she finds the flash drives by accident when she knocks over a picture frame containing them after Diane shows her Ken’s computer, with no blackmail files on it.

Needless to say, this being a Lifetime movie, the cult leaders sooner or later kidnap Nicole's daughter Ari (ya remember Nicole’s daughter Ari?), or at least hold her hostage inside Nicole’s home, and writer Corey Shurge (a man, by the way, and a quite hot-looking man at that) throws us a couple of curveballs: first [spoiler alert!] they have Ken Palmer turn out to be a true believer and his more sinister brother Justin saying, “It was all a scam!,” then [double spoiler alert!] it turns out that the real brains of the operation was Diane, who lured Nicole into Ken’s office to show you there was no blackmail information on his computer and thereby convince her that Initiative was clean. It was also she who committed the various murders and kept the cover-ups going, and when the real, uncorrupted police finally show up Justin and Diane briefly talk about escaping and restarting Initiative in another city. Eventually they’re taken into custody but a final point-of-view shot shows Nicole and Ari still being spied on by someone unknown to them or us. The more I think about it, the better I like Bound by Blackmail a.k.a. Dangerous Cult, especially for the various Catch-22”s writer Shurge keeps putting Nicole in. She doesn’t know whom she can trust, and in one chilling scene Nicole and others are silently reading Initiative’s textbook in a room that’s equipped with a motion sensor and a red light that does off and sounds an alarm whenever she tries to get u p in mid=session.

The film is directed by Danny Buday, whose only previous credits all seem to be for Lifetime or Hallmark, but he turns in a spectacular job here. He turns out to be great at building suspense and the only department I’d fault him for is an addiction to split-screen shots. More than most of Lifetime’s “pussies in peril” movies (the phrase is New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd's), Bound by Blackmail s.k.a, Dangerous Cult makes us really feel for the heroine in her plight, and ot contains enough reversals to keep the plot interesting without having so many they risk giving the viewers whiplash. And I also suspect Corey Shurge drew on the real-life accusations against the Church of Scientology for his fictitious cult;, The Church of Scientology has been reliably accused of following some of the same strategies as “Initiative” in the film, including adding additional courses to extract more and more money from its members; using information obtained in E-meter Scientology readings to blackmail people into staying in the church and paying more and more money to tiem (a lot of people involved in Scientology don’t realize that their E-meter revelations are not protected by confidentiality the way sessions with a licensed therapist are); and taking a no-holds-barred “fair game” approach to the Church’s critics, especially when they also happen to be former members speaking out publicly about the Church’s alleged abuses.