Burned by Love (Johnson Prudiction Group, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I turned on the Lifetime channel January 15 for a couple of movies, a “World Premiere” of something called Burned by Love and the “world premiere” from the previous night, How to Murder Your Husband: The Nancy Brophy Story. Burned by Love was so obscure imdb.com hadn’t put up a page for it (though they have now) and it was a bit frustrating and confusing not to have a cast list to refer to. I did recognizes the names of director Michelle Ouelett and writer Shawn Riopelle, both of whom have worked together on previous Lifetime movies. It opens with one of the greatest scenes Lifetime has ever done: a philandering husband named Roger shows up at his home with another woman in tow. Unbeknownst to him, his wife Ashley Morris (Shiva Negar) has planned a surprise party for his birthday. “Surprise!” she and her invited guests yell. Then Ashley gets predictably angry at her husband for having brought another woman home for extra-relational activities, and she takes the painting she had made for him as a birthday present ans storms out. Then we cut to a chyron reading, “One Year Later,” and one year later Ashley is living on her own, in a house she inherited from an aunt, when unbeknownst to her, her best friend, Tess Parks (Mikaela Dyke) signs her up for an online dating service because Tess thinks Ashley needs to overcome her distrust of men and start dating again.

Alas, the online dating service takes Ashley from the proverbial frying pan into the fire, as she meets and has a virtual affair with Marco Pastore (Dillon Casey), who’s not bad-looking but not especially drop-dead gorgeous either. They have long sessions video-conferencing, during one of which Ashley falls asleep with Marco’s imaginary presence still very much with her. Well before the second commercial break, it’s become readily apparent to us that Marco is scamming her, and so it turns out when he gives her a cock-and-bull story about being robbed just before she was supposed to fly out to the deserted island where he lives and spend a hot weekend with him in the flesh. He tells her his bank accounts have been frozen and he needs $8,000, which she wires him, Then, his mission accomplished, he purges all traces of his identity from the Web and she realizes she’s been taken for a small fortune she can ill afford to lose, especially since she’s already supposed to be paying Roger for the right to the business name they were using together and he’s threatened to cancel the deal if she doesn’t pay up immediately.

Ashley’s career and finances seem to be saved when restaurant owner Jacquelyn (Alexis Koetting) hires Ashley, on Tess’s insistence, to do a ceramic mural for her remodeling job. Ashley and Tess are having an evening together when Tess sees Marco’s profile on another dating site. Tess suggests they do a site of their own denouncing Marco as a con artist and warning women away from him. Suddenly Marco’s business is in ruins because the Internet is full of warnings about him, and naturally he blames Ashley and determines to ruin her life the way she ruined his. Marco sneaks into the restaurant and destroys the mural, then plants a bug in Ashley’s handbag so he can eavesdrop on her 24/7 and learn her secrets. After that he traces Ashley’s ex Roger (ya remember Ashley’s ex Roger?) and beats him up to get him to reveal all her secret turn-ons and sexual vices. Jacquelyn fires Ashley over the destroyed mural and AShley’s only confidant, besides Tess, is Grant (Drew Nelson), a contractor working on the remodel to whom Ashley is attracted. The two end up having a date together, sharing banana cream pie at a diner and then going back to Ashley’s place to have sex – only Marco is outside eavesdropping on them with a monocular so he can watch as well as listen (courtesy of the bug in her handbag) as they get it on.

While Ashley is briefly convinced that Roger was the one who destroyed her mural – until he convinces her otherwise – Marco then targets Tess, forcing her to shoot a video denouncing Ashley as a liar and then kidnapping her, holding her in a motel room and threatening to kill Tess if Ashley gets the police involved. Fortunately, Ashley has a secret weapon: she’s been getting messages from various women Marco scammed and she recruits them for a private dinner at Jacquelyn’s restaurant. Ostensibly Ashely is inviting Marco to this event to make a video retracting her previous statements denouncing him, but once Marco shows up he recognizes the women from his previous scam calls and freaks out. When he spots the cops there he grabs Ashley and holds a knife to her throat, threatening to kill her at once if the cops (who are there in force, led by a particularly dykey woman detective) intervene, but Grant shows up with Tess, whom he was able to trace because the night manager at the motel where Marco was holding her was one of Marco’s previous victims and lost her life savings to him. Marco abducts Ashley but the cops are able to trace her, run him down and arrest him, and in the tag scene Ashley and Tess are having a companionate evening with hot stud Grant in tow.

Burned by Love is an O.K. Lifetime movie even though after the spectacular opening scene it goes pretty much downhill from there, though the casting directors did a pretty good job with the male leads. Dillon Casey as Marco (or Nicholas Pochuk, his original name, which he reacts to much the way Transgender people do when called by their pre-transition identities, which they call their “dead names”) is nice-looking enough we can believe he gets away with his scams as long as he does (including an elderly woman named Dorothy whom he successfully makes online love to and disappoints when she realizes he was only interested in her money), while Dave Nelson is sufficiently hot and studly we can accept him as the guy Shawn Riopelle is setting up to be the “good guy” to redeem Ashley from her rotten luck with both Roger and Marco. Alas, Riopelle also filled their script (“their” because there’s no indication on imdb.com whether they are male or female) with so many frankly unbelievable plot devices – including giving Marco an almost supernatural ability to get into other people’s spaces, including Ashley’s home and Jaccquelyn’s restaurant (c’mon, Shawn, don’t people ever lock their doors in your world?) – that someone should have given them the note the central character of How to Murder Your Husband routinely gets from publishers and agents that her plots are too preposterous and frankly unbelievable to work.