Nightmare Neighborhood Moms, a.k.a. Crazy Neighborhood Moms (Storyteller Studios, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Alas, the second film on Lifetime’s double bill, Nightmare Neighborhood Moms, turned out to be much less interesting. It also dealt with murder in suburbia, though this time we know who the killer is from the get-go: Bonnie Mason (Gina Simms), who crashes the home of a woman named Kira (Brey Noelle) who’s been having an affair with Bonnie’s husband Christian (Johnathan Gorman). Kira is understandably shocked that instead of her paramour she’s being confronted with Mrs. Paramount waving a gun in her face, but she doesn’t have much time to be startled because Bonnie lets her have it and the gun kills her. Then we get a typical Lifetime chyron, “Three Months Later,” and three months later Kira’s old house has finally been sold to a Black woman, Charlotte Porter (April Hale), and her daughter Jordan (Summer Madison). Charlotte and Bonnie are both distributors for a line of feminine beauty and weight-loss products called Everelle, and the Everelle company is running a contest in which the top seller in the region over a specified time gets a new BMW as a prize.

Charlotte has moved to this bedroom community in the Atlanta suburbs (both Secret Lives of Housewives and Nightmare Neighborhood Moms take place in Atlanta and its environs) to get Jordan into a highly selective STEM program at the local high school. Without it, the highly talented Jordan will have to go to a boarding school in New Hampshire for a similar education (at least that’s how writer Melissa Cassera set it up), and while Charlotte is understandably reluctant to send her daughter off to boarding school, she can’t leave Atlanta and move to New Hampshire (as Jordan actually suggests) because that would mean giving up her job with Everelle as well as her remaining business and social contacts in Atlanta. Charlotte mentions to Bonnie that her cousin is the superintendent of the school district putting on the STEM program, and Bonnie offers to put in a good word for Jordan in terms of getting her into the program – only Bonnie secretly does j ust the opposite, telling her cousin that Jordan Porter is a thieving little bitch who has set up an online neighborhood watch program so she can tell when people are out so she can break into their homes and burglarize them.

Meanwhile, Charlotte and Bonnie are rivals for the Everelle prize and, much to Bonnie’s furious disgust, Charlotte wins. Bonnie decides to get her revenge by pouring bleach into the gas tank of the prize car, but instead of killing or injuring Charlotte, the sabotage instead kills Angela Samuels (Coley Campany), a close friend of Bonnie’s and the woman wh o helped cover up the murder of Kira so Bonnie wouldn’t go to prison for killing Kira. Angela’s daughter Sabrina (Sarah Jirgai) walks out of her mom’s memorial service after Bonnie starts droning on about what close friends they were; Sabrina tells Jordan, who walked out of the memorial when she did, that Bonnie actually hated Angela and tried to drive her out of the neighborhood until Bonnie killed Kira and needed Angela’s help to cover up the crime. The climax occurs on the night of a big celebratory dinner eing given by the top brass of Everelle in Atlanta, at which Charlotte and Bonnie are being considered for a top sales position with the company that will enable the lucky woman to stop having to sell the products door-to-door and allow them to work from an office.

Only Bonnie is so determined to make sure that she and not Charlotte gets that job that she lures Charlotte out to a home in a remote area of town called Marshall Hills, where there is no cell-phone service, which Bonnie knows about because Angela, a realtor, was trying to sell Bonnie and Christian the house. By posing as a potential Everelle customer, Bonnie is able to lure Charlotte into the house’s adjoining shed and literally lock her in, then head to Atlanta for the big dinner so she can grab the big job in Charlotte’s absence. The plot nearly works except that Jordan Porter goes to Bonnie’s husband Christian, and the two of them deduce what Bonnie has done to Charlotte, drive out to Marshall Hills and free her. Then the two of them take Charlotte to the big dinner and Bonnie is exposed, and she responds by attacking Christian and presumably getting herself arrested.

There are a fee good things in Nightmare Neighborhood Moms, notably some nicely written scenes during which they show they’ve reached a modus vivendi because she knows all his dirty little secrets, including the illegal things he’s done to make more money from his business, and he knows that Bonnie killed Kira (though writer Cassera never explains just how the women were able to cover up Bonnie’s murder of Kira and why there wasn’t more of a police investigation than there was), but this is a pretty sleazy production and the only good thing I can say about the directors, a husband-and-wife team named Linden Ashby and Susan Walters Ashby (though the on-screen credits don’t give her married name), is they managed to get a great bitch performance out of Gina simms as Bonnie. The rest of the cast delivers the goods but they’re nothing special, and it’s hard to believe that Johnathan Gorman is such a stud muffin that no woman in the neighborhood can resist him – though one thing Bonnie accuses him of is trying to seduce Charlotte. He says he’s not interested hin her “that way,” and from what we see between the two of them there’s no reason not to believe him. Overall, however, Nightmare Neighborhood Moms just drags on and on to a predictable resolution, and it’s not much of a movie and after Secret Lives of Housewives it looks even weaker than it was.