Secret Lives of Housewives (Juniper Lane Productions, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night at 8 I put on the Lifetime channel for a double bill of movies whose titles pretty much say it all: Secret Lives of Housewives and Nightmare Neighborhood Moms – though the little of the last is listed on imdb.com as Crazy Neighborhood Moms. Secret Lives of Housewives was actually pretty good, produced by Ken Sanders (who created the “Whittendale Universe” – Whittendale University was a super-expensive private college and the stories about it produced by Sanders and usually written by J. Bryan Dick and Barbara Kymlicka – and yes, I got a kick out of stories with such high sexual content being read by Mr. Dick and Ms. Cum-Licker! – and dealing with young, hot female high-school or college students either becoming mistresses or actively turning tricks to raise the money to pay Whittendale’s sky-high tuition), directed by Dave Thomas (presumably not the same guy who founded the Wendy’s fast-food chain) and written by an old Ken Sanders hand, Chris Sivertson.

The opening scene shows Our (Anti-)Heroine, Kendra Davis (Jessica Morris), out on a date with a hot blond stud, Eric Curry (Bo Yokely, the sort of name that in classic Hollywood days would have been changed). They meet for drinks at a bar and then go back to Eric’s place, but though they get as far as Eric taking his shirt off and revealing an absolutely lovely set of pecs on a clean-shaven chest, Kendra draws back from the actual down-and-dirty and instead insists on picking up a ride-share and going home. The reason she stops short of actual extra-relational activity is she’s already got a husband, corporate attorney Peter Davis (Justin Berti), who drives around in a sinister-looking black SUV and is clearly following her to see of he can catch her up to the proverbial no-good. Later we learn that Peter has a partner on the side of his own: Heather Nolan (Crystal Day), whose son Will (Drew Youngblood) is the best friend of the Davises’ son, Langston (Charlie Hitt, who has a particularly nice head of hair). Or at least he was until Langston’s dad started fucking Will’s mom (though for a film produced by the creator of the Whittendale Universe this movie is oddly reticent on the subject of actual sex; this script could have been made under the old Produciton Code with virtually no changes at all!), whereupon Will started bullying Langston until Langston hit him at a sports practice.

Once again, we don’t see this happen but we hear about it when Kendra gets a call in the middle of a police interrogation and is asked to drive by Langston’s school to pick him up early And just why was Kendra the subject of a police interrogation? Because the night after Eric and Kendra had their date (of sorts), Eric was found dead in his garage, clubbed to death with one of his own wrenches. It turns out Eric was a remodeling contractor, and he met a lot of lonely, bored housewives who were vulnerable to his admittedly sexy charms, including Heather and Samantha Rogers (Brianna Butler), the African-American woman whom Kendra told Peter she was with the night she was actually stepping out on him with Eric. For a while I wondered whether Sivertson was setting up Samantha to be The Heroine’s Black Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot But Is Killed Before She Can Warn Her, but in the end she’s rather peripheral to the action. The police detectives assigned to investigate Eric’s murder are a sour-looking Black woman with long, straight hair who isn’t listed on the film’s imdb.com page (neither the character name nor the actress playing her) and junior detective Schilling (Cesar Charlatte), a super-tall man who reminded me of Fred Muldoon (Fred Gwynne) on the old TV sitcom Car 54, Where Are You?

The two cops become convinced Peter Davis was the actual killer and they try to badger Kendra for information implicating him. The two clues the police know about are the murder weapon, a red personalized wrench with the initials “E.C.” on it, and Eric’s cell phone, which Kendra discovers in her laundry basket one night but it later mysteriously disappears from where she left it. Kendra finds the wrench in Peter’s bedroom, but it turns out that the real killer is [spoiler alert!] their son Langston, who was determined to make sure his parents stayed together by eliminating the competition. Langston explains to his parents that the night he went to Eric’s place he didn’t intend to kill him – just to get him the message to leave his mom alone, which he had texted him earlier and Eric’s phone would have documented except that it disappeared. (The text would not appear on Langston’s own phone because he sent it via his computer rather than his phone.) Only Eric made the mistake of laughing at Langston just as the schoolkids who’d been bullying him over his parents’ affairs had done, so Langston waited until Eric’s back was turned and then grabbed the wrench and clubbed him over the head with it. Peter Davis – an attorney, remember, and therefore an officer of the court legally obliged to report all crimes he knows about to the authorities – decides to cover up his son’s crime, and Kendra reluctantly goes along. (The script doesn’t specify she’s reluctant about covering up a murder committed by her son, but Jessica Morris is a strong enough actress she’s able to suggest with her facial expressions just how queasy she is about the whole idea of keeping her son killing someone a secret.)

In a chillingly open-ended finish, just when it seems Langston Davis is home free thanks to his parents’ cover-up, he steals a kitchen knife from the family home, sneaks into Heather’s home (which he knows well because he and Will used to do sleep-overs there when they were still friends), gets into her bedroom without waking her, holds the knife to her throat and … The film ends there but we get the idea; perhaps with Lifetime already having aired a TV-movie remake of The Bad Seed and about to do a sequel called The Bad Seed Returns, one of their producers thought it would be opportune to do a film in which the villain is a psychopathic boy rather than a psychopathic girl. Be that as it may, Secret Lives of Housewives (a title which would lead one to expect a more salacious and less violent movie than this turned out to be) is actually a quite good thriller, a whodunit with a legitimately surprising ending and well directed by Dave Thomas, who manages to hit just the right level of sex and sinister imagery to get the piece to work right.