Ice Road Killer (Fireside Pictures, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

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

My husband Charles came home from work in time to join me in watching the second Lifetime movie I screened last night, Ice Road Killer. This didn’t have the extraordinary social resonances of He’s Not Worth Dying For; instead it’s just a simple, straightforward action/suspense thriller based on the exploits of a mother, Helen Taylor (Sarah Allen), who is driving through the frozen North – where the snow and other weather conditions are so wretched we’re at least briefly unsure whether the film takes place in the U.S. or Canada – to pick up her daughter Lauren (Erica Anderson) from college for a vacation weekend at a deserted mountain cabin the Taylors own. “Not another deserted mountain cabin!” a hardened Lifetime movie viewer will be thinking about now – as cell phones have become more important, a lot of Lifetime writers have started setting the endings of their scripts at deserted mountain cabins so the people are out of the range of cell-phone service and therefore the heroines can’t call the police for rescue from the villain – and there are scenes in this film that use that trope. Helen picks up a hitchhiker, a woman named Carly (Zoë Belkin) who gibes Helen enough of a sob story she falls for it.

In reality Carly is a thief, engaged in a scam with her boyfriend Boyd (Connor McMahon, who’s so genuinely hunky it’s a pity we lose him in the second reel – more later) in which she gets rides from strangers and then texts him the information so he can ambush them and they can make off with their valuables. Carly has misgivings about targeting the Taylors – when she learns Helen makes her living as a music teacher she figures they probably don’t have enough worth stealing, and later she sees a gun in Helen’s glove compartment and freaks out. But Boyd insists on going through with the scheme, telling Carly that after this one last job they’ll have enough money to high-tail it to Mexico. Only they get ambushed themselves by a sinister dude in a big rig who’s identified in the cast list only as “Trucker” (Michael Swatton), who knocks off Boyd in reel two and then chases after Carly, sending her threatening texts from Boyd’s phone with threats about how he’s slowly going to dismember her before he finally kills her. Writer Shawn Riopelle (whom I’ve heard of previously as the author of similar Lifetime movies like The Evil Twin, Deadly House Call and Stalked by a Prince) and director Max McGuire (whom I hadn’t) carefully keep “Trucker” in the background as an abstract figure of menace, and even when we start seeing full-figure shots of him about midway through the movie we’re clearly supposed to hate the guy and not look for redeeming qualities in him the way a Lifetime write like Christine Conradt would want us to.

The only moment of pathos comes when he finally explains to Helen and Lauren exactly why he’s so anxious to avenge himself against Boyd and Carly. It seems that he was one of their previous victims, and Carly first offered herself to him sexually, then blindfolded him as part of their scene, only instead of sex he got robbed as he was helpless and this totally ruined his life. He also blames Helen and Lauren for having spoiled his revenge plot because he originally just wanted to kill Boyd and Carly – “That would have been justice!” he exclaims – only because Helen fell for Carly’s sob story he’s going to have to kill two innocent strangers as well. There are some interesting twists and turns in Riopelle’s script – like Lauren being pregnant and Carly catching on far quicker than her not-so-streetwise mother does – and an odd scene in which the three women are staying at “Earl’s Diner” in a guest room Earl makes available for them (Earl himself is one of the most interesting and appealing characters in the story) and nearly murder a man who they think is “Trucker” but in the end is just an innocent older man. But in the end “Trucker” kills Carly with a knife after he’s overpowered her and she’s lost the gun she stole from Helen (ya remember the gun?). Then he ties Helen and Lauren up and proposes to burn down the cabin he is holding them in (it’s not clear whether this is the cabin Helen and Lauren were on their way to or another one, though I had the impression it was “Trucker”’s own). It’s not clear whether he intends this to be a murder-suicide or “Trucker” intends to escape as the flames consume the cabin and kill Helen and Lauren, but eventually “Trucker” nuggets overpowered by the two women and it is Helen who finally beats him to death with a tire iron. Then the two survivors are, ironically, forced to hitchhike themselves and the driver is a skeptical Black woman with butch hair who at first is reluctant to pick them up, but ultimately does so.

I ran into an interesting blog post on the Cinemaholic Web site, https://thecinemaholic.com/is-lifetimes-ice-road-killer/, which argued that though Ice Road Killer is a work of fiction there’s a fascinating real-life prototype to the story. It happened in the U.S. in 1938 and involved Hazel Frome and her daughter Nancy. “The two embarked on a cross-country road trip from Berkeley, California, to South Carolina on March 23, 1938, to meet with Nancy’s younger sister Mada and her husband Lt. Benjamin McMakin,” wrote Kumari Shriva for Cinemaholic. ”Hazel and Nancy had to stop in El Paso, Texas, due to issues with the engine. The car stayed in the mechanic’s shop for almost five days before the mother and daughter left on March 30, 1938, with a repaired car and embarked on the desert road to Pecos, Texas. Just a day later, the Packard was discovered in a ditch with unlocked doors and keys still in the ignition. The only things missing were the luggage, Hazel and Nancy. The disappearance of the Frome women made national news, with people searching everywhere for them. Their bodies were found on April 3, 1938, though the motive behind the murder remained a mystery. Though the women’s bodies bore signs of brutal torture, later confirmed by medical professionals, they were not raped. Robbery was also ruled out as a possible reason since they were still wearing their valuable jewelry.” Suspicion at the time fell on Wesley Frome, Helen’s husband and Nancy’s father, who was an executive at a company that made explosives; there were even allegations that Nazi spies were involved. The true story probably would have made a much more interesting movie than the fictionalized version we got, though probably Lifetime’s budget would not have allowed them to do a convincing period piece. As it is, Ice Road Killer is the sort of movie that’s good for what it is, but as my husband Charles pointed out what it is is something we’ve seen many times before as film and TV show makers have been doing this lost-on-deserted-roads-and-in-mortal-peril stories for decades now.