Disappearance in Yellowstone (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night at 8 I put on a LIfetime movie called Disappearance in Yellowstone, directed by Tony Dean Smith (a name I didn’t recognize) from a script by Paul A. Birkett (which I did). It had a few unusual wrinkles, mostly nibbling around the edges of the usual Lifetime clichés and with two drop-dead gorgeous guys, but was mostly a cut-to-pattern piece. The plot starts with mother Jessie Mae Gephart (Lucie Guest) and her sullen daughter Michelle (Cassandra Sawtell) driving from California to the legendary Yellowstone National Park in Montana. Jessie and Michelle’s father have just gone through a bitter breakup and Jessie tells us via some of the other characters that he was abusing her, but all this is carefully concealed from Michelle, so she thinks her dad is a hero and her mom is an asshole for leaving him and dragging her away from her friends and her electronics to go on a trip to see natural beauty Michelle couldn’t be less interested in. Jessie and Michelle stop at a place called the Bear Bites Diner, where Jessie sends Michelle in to order something because she doesn’t want to leave the car to buy anything herself. While in the restaurant Michelle is chatted up by a hot baby-faced guy named Nolan (Aren Buchholz) who is a park ranger – or at least he’s wearing the uniform of one – and those of us who have watched more than two Lifetime movies before are immediately convinced that he’s up to no good, especially since, like a lot of other Lifetime writers, Birkett has him mention that there are some scary human predators in the park and she needs to be wary of them.

Then Birkett throws us a curve ball when he has Jessie’s and Michelle’s car break down in the middle of nowhere. They have a map which indicates that there’s a service station about a mile’s walk from where they are stranded, and when Jessie shows up (alone) to the garage, the person who greets her is the proprietor, Grant Hollings (Jonathan Scarfe), who’s first shown working on a car with his shirt off. He doesn’t have the killer baby face of Aren Buchholz but he’s got great pecs, and director Smith and cinematographer Jay Kamal driver us a lot of choice views of them. Unfortunately, while Michelle is waiting alone by the car for her mom to return, Nolan drives by, offers her a ride, and then injects her with a knockout drug that renders her unconscious. She comes to in an old deserted cabin (not another old deserted cabin, especially in a place where there is no cell-phone reception!) where Nolan is imprisoning her, and though she gets loose long enough to grab his hunting rifle he’s taken the precaution of removing all its bullets. Meanwhile, as Grant Hollings and Jessie are staking out the diner because they’ve learned that Nolan is a “regular” there, they’re both accosted by police officer Darrell Stoddard (Reese Alexander, the one African-American cast member in a featured role), who’s immediately convinced that Jessie is a kidnapper because her ex sent out a notice saying she’d taken their daughter by force.

Stoddard mentions allegations that Grant’s garage is a front for a “chop shop” (a place where stolen cars are disassembled so their parts can be sold), which just raised my suspicions that Birkett was planning a last-minute reversal in which Grant would turn out to be the real villain and Nolan would turn out to have drugged Michelle just as a way of saving her from Grant – but no such luck. Nolan ends up kidnapping Jessie as well and getting a sick kick out of having mom and daughter both held captive under his roof; he says he’s going to skin Michelle alive while forcing mom to listen and then doing the same to her. Grant and his friend Wally (Ben Cotton) set out to track down Nolan, only Nolan ambushes them and shoots them with his rifle. He leaves both of them for dead but Officer Stoddard finds them in time to save Grant even though Wally actually does die. Meanwhile, Nolan has left a bear trap outsider his cabin and, thinking of Anton Chekhov’s famous advice to would-be playwrights that of you introduce a gun in act one, it has to go off in act three, I wondered what Birkett was going to do with it. I was worried he was going to have Jessie trapped in it just as she’s trying to escape (for someone who’s supposed to have done this lots of times before, as we’re told Nolan has, he doesn’t seem to be all that good at bondage), but in the end it’s Nolan who gets caught in his own bear trap. He’s still got his gun and tries to use it to shoot down both Jessie and Michelle, but a bear – a real one – comes along as a deus ex machina and takes care of him, while Jessie and Grant get together as lovers (as foreshadowed by a scene in which they clearly had sex in the back of Grant’s SUV while they were staking out the Bear Bite Diner to wait for Nolan).

Disappearance in Yellowstone is a movie that rose and fell on the performance of Aren Buchhoilz as the psycho, and he was literally overwrought, as if he were trying to fuse psychotic characterizations from classic 1940’s films noir – Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death, Lawrence Tierney in Born to Kill and Neville Brand in D.O.A. – though it’s highly unlikely Buchholz has actually seen any of those movies. More likely Tony Dean Smith was just telling him to giggle a lot and punctuate his utterance with weird little cackles that sounded more silly than scary – and it didn’t help that right after this movie we saw Joseph H. Lewis’s 1945 vest-pocket thriller My Name is Julia Ross (which I already wrote about when Charles and I watched it together in 2009 at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/07/my-name-is-julia-ross-columbia-1945.html, and I have little to add) and got to see George Macready’s chillingly understated performance as that film’s sinister psycho, who just because of his restraint is far more terrifying (though I must say I got enough of a kick watching Buchholz’ hot bod I’d like to see him in something else – especially something in which he’s playing a good guy, just as the day after Charles and I watched James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic I bought the videotape of The Phantom because I’d thought Billy Zane was so much sexier than Leonardo di Caprio I wanted to see him as a superhero!). In the end we’re given the preposterous explanation that Nolan became a psychopath because his father, a real park ranger, trained him to be one – supposedly the old man was himself a serial killer and he taught his son to kidnap, torture and kill park tourists, and the son took over dad’s sinister family business after dad croaked – thereby adding Michael Powell’s 1959 thriller Peeping Tom to the sheer number of better movies from which this one ripped off.