Deadly Yoga Retreat (ZMA Films, Mauiwood, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Alas, after two better-than-average movies last night Lifetime reverted to the usual silliness for their third film of the night, the “premiere” of a piece of kinky trash called Deadly Yoga Retreat. This is a sort of follow-up to an earlier Lifetime movie from 2020 called Psycho Yoga Instructor, which when I posted to moviemagg about it I joked that it sounded like a bunch of Lifetime writers had got together and brainstormed, “What’s the stupidest title a Lifetime movie could have?” I even found myself wondering whether the lead characters in Psycho Yoga Instructor and Deadly Yoga Retreat were supposed to be the same person, especially since the villain in Psycho Yoga Instructor had escaped and fled the scene of his crimes to set up shop elsewhere. Both films were made by the same writer-director team, Brian Herzlinger and Robert Black (Herzlinger got sole directorical credit but split the writing credits with Black), so it’s possible they meant Deadly Yoga Retreat to be a sequel even though different actors play the villains in each: Panos Vlahos in Psycho Yoga Instructor and Jonathan Bennett (whom we’re told is drop-dead gorgeous but is only ordinarily attractive) in Deadly Yoga Retreat.

Deadly Yoga Retreat starts at an island waterfall with a young woman at the top and a young man at the bottom. He’s trying to coax her to jump off the cliff into the water and she’s pleading with him to climb up instead – which he can’t because he’s afraid of heights. Since the noise of the waterfall drowns them out whenever they try to communicate, he’s left helpless to do something about it when a stranger sneaks behind him and slashes her throat, causing her blood to trickle down the waterfall as she dies. (That’s about the limit of creative direction from Brian Herzlinger in this movie.) Then we meet the leads of our story, Isabella Miller (Danielle C. Ryan) and her husband Patrick (Eric Gillom), who’s totally bald in a way that reminded me of Lex Luthor or Cueball. Isabella is disaffected with her life because she gave up her career as a yoga teacher five years before at the urging of her husband, who wanted her to attend law school and ultimately practice as an attorney, when she receives a letter and an information packet announcing that she’s been accepted to a weekend retreat in Hawai’i under yoga teacher Remington “Remy” Morrow (Jonathan Bennett). Once she arrives with her best friend Pam (Sara Ashley Rodriguez) in tow – Pam is described as single after two failed marriages and she falls in lust with Remy at first sight – Isabella finds out that Remy runs the place like a yoga boot camp, driving the students hard and sending them back home if they don’t measure up to his high standards.

Of course we learn that he’s more than just legitimately tough: when he confronts his first victim, Nina (Ashley Brinkman), after she can’t hold a pose in practice, he first comes on to her and, when she insists that she’s in love with her husband and not interested in any extra-relational activity he brutally strangles her and leaves it to his point person at the resort, Jeffrey (Vene Chun), to dispose of the body. Later another woman at the retreat actually agrees to have sex with Remy to avoid getting cut from the class – only he double-crosses her and, when she objects, he strangles her, too. By the time he’s done Remy has murdered four people, including one woman he selects for a special honor: to climb up the local mountain and do yoga at the summit. Along with Isabella and Pam, Remy selects Lisa (Jennifer Rikert Wolski) for this honor even though Lisa has only one lung and so she’s sorely taxed by the ultra-thin air on the mountaintop. At one point Lisa insists she can’t go on, and Remy sends Isabella and Pam away to see if they find a live spot for cell-phone service even though Remy had previously told them the entire mountain was a dead spot. Too late they realize that Remy sent them off on this fool’s errand just so he’d be left alone long enough to murder Lisa, and when Isabella finally realizes she’s in mortal danger from her (dare I say it?) psycho yoga instructor, she flees and he yells at her that he knows the mountain far better than she does and so she won’t be able to get away from him. Eventually, however, she’s able to kill Remy with a pickaxe a forestry crew on the mountain has conveniently left behind, though not before Remy has fatally stabbed Pam (one plot twist I could have done without).

At the end all the bodies have been placed in plastic bags and Isabella is reunited with Patrick, even though he’s no great prize – maybe it’s just because his total baldness reminded me of comic-book villains like Luthor or Cueball, but I never liked him and wished she could have landed something better than a bald guy or a psycho crook. Deadly Yoga Retreat is marked by the incredible seriousness with which Brian Herzlinger stages the utter trash he and Robert Black concocted, and aside from one scene in which Remy says that at age 12 he asked his mother’s drug-dealing boyfriend to stop giving her drugs, and got beaten up by the boyfriend and told by his mom that he shouldn’t do anything to upset him again, that’s the only clue we get as to What Made Remy Run – a far cry from the complexity with which Jason-Shane Scott drew the villains in Abduction Runs in the Family.