Nightmare PTA Moms (Almost Never Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Yesterday at 8 p.m. I put on a couple of movies on Lifetime, including one very much to their usual formulae called Nightmare PTA Moms (now why do I get the impression Lifetime’s writers sit around and brainstorm, “Just what’s the absolutely silliest title for a Lifetime movie we can dream up?”) and then the first part of a five-part, 10-hour miniseries called Flowers in the Attic: The Origin. Nightmare PTA Moms, both written and directed by men (Dave Thomas was the director and Adam Balsam the writer), hews pretty close to the usual Lifetime formula, though it has at least one slight deviation: to play Rick Gardner, the innocent young husband and father, casting director Ricki Maslar got an unusually hunky guy, Jonathan Stoddard. Not only do we get a lot of yummy shots of him topless and showing off a great pair of pecs, Stoddard is so sexy he’s the kind of guy Lifetime usually casts as a villain. As the film begins Rick has uprooted his family, wife Gail (Brianna Cohen) and middle school-age daughter Chloe (Madison Paige), to take a promotion in his job for Jackie Z, a fashion retailer that seems to specialize in middle-end clothes, not too fancy but not totally plain, either. Instead of just running one Jackie Z store, Rick will be regional manager and responsible for at least 12 outlets. Rick is excited at the new job and the extra money he’ll be making, even though Gail is unhappy because she’s built up a catering business, Gail’s Goodies, and she’ll have to start from scratch in a new town, Clearwater, Florida. (The locale isn’t identified until well into the movie, but from the stock shots of causeways we get in the opening I was already thinking Fl;orida.)

The film actually begins with a black-ahd-white prologue set five years before the main action (though Lifetime doesn’t give us their usual chyron to tell how much time has elapsed between the prologue and the main body of the film), in which a man goes down a flight of stairs in search of a malfunctioning electrical circuit and either falls or is pushed down a long flight of stairs in the dark. Only later do we learn that this man is financial adviser Bill Vanderberg, and his widow Vanessa (Alissa Filoramo) runs the local PTA (the initials stand for “Parent-Teacher Association” but there don’t seem to be any teachers involved) with all the sympathy and understanding of a Mob boss. Over the summer Vanessa lost her re-election bid for PTA president to a woman named Lexie Wilson, only just a week after the election (like Donald Trump, Vanessa refused to accept her loss and insisted on a ballot recount, which produced exactly the same vote as the first coult) Lexie apparently committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills. Vanessa re-assumed the PTA presidency at the exclusive Bellhaven Academy and blackmailed the remaining PTA members to cover for her and lie to the police investigating Lexie’s death. Gail Gardner joins the local PTA, hoping for (among other things) networking opportunities to build up her catering business, and immediately runs afoul of Vanessa’s iron control.

When Vanessa’s daughter Serena (Gracie Silva) falls behind in soliciting contributions for the PTA’s walkathon, she pressures a Black woman on the PTA whose husband gave only $10 to give more so Serena will be on top again. Later she goes ballistic when at the PTA’s annual Hallowe’en costume party, Vanessa’s sorceress costume loses the top prize to Gail Gardner’s outfit as Marie Antoinette (with Rick in the audience, dressed as Louis XVI, cheering her on). While she’s at the party she gets word from an Asian-American PTA member named Sunny (Hana Liu) who tells her that Vanessa definitely murdered her husband (though since Vanessa and Bill were alone in the house when she killed him, one wonders how she would know) and blackmailed Sunny into giving her a false alibi. She was able to do this because Sunny had been the treasurer of the PTA when Vanessa was president, and Vanessa threatened to lie and accuse her of embezzling the group’s funds. According to Sunny, Vanessa’s motive for murdering Bill was jealousy: she was convinced he was having an affair with Lexie Wilson and wanted to put a stop to it even if it meant making herself a widow (which status she of course uses for maximum social sympathy). Vanessa has also decided to seduce Rick, and to that end she shows up at Jackie Z to buy a very sexy-looking skin-tight black-and-white yoga outfit and asks Rick to help her in the fitting room. Rick is already under suspicion from Gail because he earlier carried on an online flirtation with a woman, though it stopped short of even a face-to-face meeting, much less anything down-’n’-dirty. Gail is convinced that Rick’s 25-year-old assistant Sissy (Hedy Nasser) has the hots for him – which is believable judging from what we see of the body language between them – and once Gail learns that Rick left his phone in the dressing room while helping Vanessa, she’s immediately convinced that the two of them are, if not yet having an affair, at least on their way to one.

Gail goes to Jackie Z and buys the same spectacular yoga outfit Vanessa did (and it looks equally hot on both of them), and she happens to be wearing it when, after a call ostensibly from a Bellhaven alumni association but actually from Vanessa – who in the meantime has also launched a campaign to sabotage Gail’s business by posting negative reviews online and spiking her cookies with a mild food poison, not enough to kill but enough to make six people sick. Thinking it’s going to be her last chance at a big order before Vanessa’s sabotage wrecks her reputation. Gail frantically cranks up her oven and produces several boxes worth of cookies and cupcakes, only of course it’s a trap and Vanessa and Gail end up on the balcony at Bellhaven. Gail’s husband Rick shows up and gets into the school absurdly easily given that we’ve been led to believe it’s after hours and all the entrances have been locked, but in the end it’s Gail herself who pushes Vanessa off the balcony rail. Just when we’ve thought Vanessa is dead, we get a typical Lifetime chyron, “Three Months Later,” and three months later Gail chairs the election meeting of the PTA, which elects Sunny the new president – while Vanessa is in prison, alive but injured from the fall, where she gets a visit from her daughter Serena, asks how Serena’s grandmother is treating her, and boasts that she’s just been elected chair of her cell-block’s inmates’ association. (Do they have such things in Florida prisons? Just asking.) Nightmare PTA Moms – a bit of a misnomer because there’s only one true “nightmare PTA mom” in the dramatis personae – is actually a fun romp through the usual Lifetime clichés, and it benefits from a full-bodied bitch performance from Alissa Filorama as Vanessa. It’s true the role is simply a stock Lifetime villainess without the dimension Christine Conradt might have given her if she’d been writing this, but Filorama plays the part with a kind of spunky intensity – and though Jonathan Stoddard is no great shakes as an actor, he’s fun enough to look at it doesn’t really matter if he can act!