Hider in My House (Almost Never Films, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night at 8 I turned on a LIfetime movie called Hider in My House, which not at all coincidentally is also part of the title of a new Lifetime TV series, Phrogging: Hider in My House, about an allegedly new sort of crime: living in someone else’s home without their knowing. Lifetime did a movie with this plot premise earlier, though I can’t recall the title, and I made the mistake of posting a review on imdb.com to the effect that though the filmmakers had intended this to be scary, it seemed more comic than anything else: one could readily imagine Chaplin or Keaton having made a film with this premise in the silent era. I got my proverbial hat handed to me by another reviewer who said the premise was very serious and I shouldn’t have called it unintentionally funny. I’ll say one thing for Hider in My House: there’s nothing funny about it, either by intention or unintention. The film was a production of Almost Never Films, Inc. and ht had some of the same personnel as this outfit’s other contributions to the Lifetime schedule, including director Dave Thomas, who is quite good at doing Gothic horror even within the confines of a modern-day suburb (in this case Clearwater, Florida, where Thomas’s last Lifetime credit, Nightmare PTA Moms, was also set). The writer is Ken Miyamoto, and the film opens with a prologue which Thomas shoots in quie good black-and-white.

The prologue features an argument between a mother and father over their son, who is psychopathic and showing violent tendencies. His dad wants to put him in a mental institution,but his mom won’t hear of it and insists that she keep him at home and make sure he is safe inside these walls. Then we get a typical Lifetime title chyron, “Twenty Years Later,” and 20 hears later the apartment has just been purchased by best-selling author Molly Bachman (Meghan Carrasquillo, whom my husband Charles thought looked like progressive New York Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio’Cortez) on the earnings from her first book. Though it was presented as fiction, it was inspired by a real-life experience she and her sister Bella (April Consalo) had at the hands of a sexual predator. The first or second day she moves in, she meets a terminally nice young man named Kyle (Thomas Gipson) who offers to help carry her groceries home and accidentally switches coffee cans on her so she gets his decaf, much to the disappointment of Bella, who’s living in the apartment with Molly as her house guest until she can move in with her boyfriend Carter (Roman Jacob Boyle). Alas, she also starts hearing odd noises from inside the apartment, many of which trigger dreams that flash her back to the assailant who unwittingly inspired her best-seller. She also leaves out a frying pan on her stove, only when she wakes up the next morning the pan has been washed and put back in its drawer. As if that weren’t bad enough, Molly is also facing immense pressure from her editor, Heather (Kimber King), to show her some pages of a new book. Heather actually tells Molly at least twice, “You’re only as good as your next book,” and she herself is being pressured by the publishers of Molly’s first novel, who naturally want a follow-up as soon as possible.

Only she’s terminally blocked until Kyle tells her the story behind her new apartment: it had been in the same family, the Chamberses, since the 18th century when the building was built in the first place. The last surviving Chamberses were father Daniel and his son Ethan – mom had died of cancer some years before – and the only reason the place had come on the market was that Daniel’s mistress, Gayle Waterford, had inherited it from Daniel much to the horror of Ethan, whose mom had promised him he could live in it permanently. When Daniel told Ethan he and Gayle were going to sell the building and move out of the country together, Ethan killed him with a hammer and threw his corpse down a disused elevator shaft he’d discovered in the building. A seedy-looking man who turns up at Molly’s book signing turns out to be Detecdtive Kramer (Marc Lucia), who’s investigating the disappearances of Daniel and Ethan Chambers as a cold case. While everything else is going on, Molly has also begun to date Kyle, and the two of them have ended up in bed together for a few soft-core porn scenes in which Thomas Gipson’s pecs are things of beauty and joys to behold. Molly is fascinated by the dark history of her new home and decides not only to write her next book about it but to present it as a true-crime story instead of fictionalizing it the way she’d done with her first book, and she starts piecing the story together from online research. She also discovers the hole in the wall through which Ethan Chambers dumped his dad’s body, though of course she doesn’t understand its significance. She just notices a joint where a cabinet had been crudely glued to the wall, pries it open and discovers Ethan Chambers’ secret hideout, after first leaving her sister Bella (ya remember her sister Bella?) a voicemail asking her to come over and talk her out of going inside the walls.

Bella duly arrives just as Molly is having her big confrontation with Kyle, who not to anyone’s surprise turns out to be Ethan Chambers; He’s convinced that the two of them are destined to be together, live in the apartment and she’s going to keep him safe the way his mom promised him she would. The only reason Charles and I didn’t guess that Kyle would turn out to be Ethan the Phrogger was neither of us thought Ken Miyamoto would be that obvious; indeed, my money was on Bella’s boyfriend Carter as the unwelcome inhabitant. Instead Kyle tries to bend Molly to his will by threatening Bella, and in the end Molly saves her sister and pushes Ethan to his death down the same disused elevator shaft which with Ethan disposed of the body of his father lo those many years ago. Hider in My House is full of narrative inconsistencies and plot holes, including how Ethan survived all those years: how did he make a living, how did he feed himself, how (and where) he used the bathroom, especially since his crazy mom home-schooled him and he therefore has lived his life almost totally isolated and unacculturated from normal human society. At one point Kyle tells Molly he has a job in real estate – that’s his explanation for how he knows the dark history of her apartment – but other than that there’s no clue as to how he’s made his living all these years. There are other, more minor lacunae in the plot, including what Bella and Carter do for a living, too; we learn they fell in love after working in the same office but we’re never told just who they work for or what their employer does.

And Hider in My House is not only a giveaway title – as Charles pointed out, it closes off a lot of other possibilities, including an outside stalker (perhaps even the assailant about whom Molly wrote her first book, who may have read it, recognized himself and gone out for revenge) – the ending leaves a sour taste in my mind. One wonders not only how Molly will ever be able to have a sex life again, especially since it took her years after her initial assault to be able to trust a man, and it turned out to be Kyle t/n Ethan the Psycho Phrogger, but also if she’ll need to have a horrible real-life experience every time she wants to write something else!