br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 8 my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing if somewhat frustrating Lifetime movie called Who Kidnapped My Mom? One of the frustrating things about this movie is that imdb.com doesn’t have a page for it, nor was I able to find a YouTube channel streaming it to get the credits that way. All I was able to find online was a couple of articles listing the major cast members, though while the director’s name meant nothing to me on screen (it looked vaguely Asian and was probably a man), I did recognize the name of the writer: Jessica Landry, whom I’d encountered recently as the author of another Lifetime movie, Deadly Mom Retreat. The plot deals with Eva Jones (Lucie Guest), 36-year-old widowed mother of two daughters, teenager Samantha “Sami” (Jordan Zavisha) and her pre-pubescent younger sister Grace (Ceilidh MacDonald). Eva’s husband Ryan dropped dead at age 34 a year previous to the main action, apparently of a heart attack, though his mother Nancy (regrettably unidentified on any of the online sources I’ve consulted even though she turns in a full-bodied villainous performance that’s one of the highlights of the movie) insists he was the victim of foul play. “Thirty-four year-old men don’t just drop dead of a heart attack!” Mancy thunders at her former daughter-in-law. Eva has already been the victim of one kidnapping attempt – though she’s recovered almost immediately – a year after her husband’s death and a year before the main action, in which she is kidnapped again, this time for real and apparently permanently.
The rest of the movie alternates between Eva’s plight and the increasingly desperate attempts of Sami to locate ahd free her. Eva is being held in a room where she’s been outfitted with a metal ankle bracelet with a chain attached linked to the floor of the wall. At first lt looks like a motel room – I even joked to Charles, “Hey, she’s being held inside a Motel 6!” – but the room has no windows and ghastly wallpaper on the walls (what did they do, borrow the set from old PRC leftovers?), and her kidnapper has installed a security video camera and a box through which he occasionally speaks with one of those voice-distorting devices. The first we hear from him is when she addresses the camera and demands to be let go, and the voice says, “Not time yet.” Meanwhile, Sami is running into unexpected opposition from everyone, including her grandmother-from-hell Nancy as well as Detective Campbell of the local police department – she’s a woman but we don’t get her first name – who’s convinced Eva faked both her kidnappings and has run away. Sami’s only real ally is her boyfriend Gabe (played by one uf the cute twinks Lifetime usually casts in roles like this). At one point Nancy not only takes custody of Sami and Grace despite their total uninterest in living with her, she even locks Sami in her room and forces her to open an upstairs window to escape, join gabe and continue the starch for her mom – an ironic reflection of her mom’s own plight, though Jessica Landry couldn’t have cared less about that.
There are various red herrings in the dramatis personae, including Clint Barker – a man Eva met through a dating app and who got obsessed with her ahd started driving past her car, apparently stalking her, but when Detective Campbell investigates him she finds he has an unshakable alibi (he was drinking at a bar the night Eva was kidnapped and filmed by their security camera) – and Charlie Black, a private investigator hired by Nancy to investigate her son Ryan’s death. Sami sees Nancy meet Black in a park and hand him a packet of money, and she immediately wonders if Nancy hired him to kidnap her mom, but later Nancy explains that she hired Black to get enough evidence to get Ryan’s body exhumed, and it turns out she was right: he was slowly poisoned with various chemicals, not enough of any of them to kill him instantly but enough to give him heart disease and lead to his premature death. There’s another suspect in the mix: Eva’s too-good-to-be-true next-door neighbor, Dane Clark (Kelsey Flower) – by coincidence also the name of a Warner Bros. tough-guy actor whose best-known credits are Pride of the Marines, 1945; and Moonrise, 1948 – whom I should have realized would turn out to be Eva’s kidnapper well before I did (which was two acts before he was formally revealed).
Jessica Landry dropped a number of hints I should have picked up on well before I did, including Dane begging off Eva’s attempts to set him un on a date with her friend Ashley (whom we never see) and the clear familiarity the kidnapper shows with Eva’s taste in food and drunk – he brings her Chinese food and coffee from favorite places of hers. Dane, it turns out, not only had an unrequited crush on Eva but was responsible for poisoning her late husband Ryan (ya remember Ryan?) in hopes of eliminating the competition so they’d end up together. Only Sami and Gabe figure it out with the help of photos Dane dropped off at Nancy’s place of Eva in what looks like a motel room but is really an underground cellar on Dane’s property where he’s been holding her. Eventually Sami and Gabe set Eva free and Eva herself knocks Dane unconscious with the proverbial blunt instrument, and the rest of the family is reconciled. Even Nancy turns out to be a good sport at the end as the three generations of Joneses sit down to a family dinner. It’s frustrating not to know who the other cast members are – especially the actress playing Nancy (and also the actor playing Gabe; he’s no great shakes as a performer but he sure is cute!) – but Who Kidnapped My Mom? Is just so typical a Lifetime movie title, and it delivers the goods engagingly without pushing the envelope of the formula or making Dane a figure of real pathos the way Christine Conradt might have done. About the only trope we didn’t get was a soft-core porn scene – but then the only characters who could have conceivably had one were Sami and Gabe, and the producers (our old friends at Neshama Entertainment and MarVista Entertainment) probably figured they were too young.
