Catfish Killer (Cartel Pictures, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Lifetime did the makers of their third January 22 movie no favors b y showing it right after The Plot to Kill My Mother and therefore making the similarities between the two all too apparent. This one is called Catfish Killer and deals with an honors student in high school in suburban California, Hannah Davis (Nicolette Langley), whose mom Marianne (Alicia Leigh Willils) is raising her as a single parent. As so often happens in a Lifetime movie, we’re not sure what happened to Hannah’s dad – did Marianne divorce him or did he die? – though we’re all too clear about what happened to Hannah’s best friend, Jane (Emary Simon). First Jane’s dad died, then Jane’s mom remarried Greg (Anthony Farrell), and then she died, leaving her with a stepfather who can’t stand her and is just waiting for her to turn 18 so he won’t have legal responsibility for her and can throw her out on her proverbial ear. Hannah has her mind set on attending Kinzer University in New York but can’t afford it on her own or her mom’s money. She’s hoping for a scholarship that was endowed by a woman who became successful after attending first that high school and then Kinzer; the scholarship is a free ride but only one is awarded per year. Hannah is called into the office of Principal Edwards (René Ashton) and told the scholarship trustees have awarded it to her. Then she’s confronted by a fellow student, Eli Johnson (Jason Marrs), who demands that she give up the scholarship and let it go to him instead because he’s the runner-up and he is so into the idea of attending Kinzer he wears a Kinzer sweatshirt everywhere he goes.

When she’s not studying, Hannah likes to pal around with Jane and their friend Scott (Daniel Grogan), who seems to have a crush on Hannah – but Hannah isn’t interested in him “that way” and instead is responding to the attentions of Kevin (Anthony Farro), a jock who’s on the school football team. By coincidence, Kevin’s dad is also attracted to Hannah’s mom Marianne. The plot kicks into high gear when Jane signs Hannah up for “Click,” a new social-media app to which Hannah quickly becomes addicted. She’s trolled on the app by a man named “James,” who seems to be in the area because he’s aware of h er every move on campus and in particular on who her actual or potential boyfriends are. Greg offers to help Marianne and Hannah track down “James,” but he’s encrypting his posts to the site and bouncing them around different IP addresses around the world even though it’s clear from his posts that “James” is in town and likely a student at the high school. All the tension sends Hannah’s school grades down and he’s in danger of losing her scholarship, especially when she’s caught turning in a plagiarized paper on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. She finds the paper she actually wrote has mysteriously been erased from her computer and the only copy that still exists is one she e-mailed herself to enable her to work on it on the school’s computers.

Eli Johnson also works on the school’s computers, and one night he’s in the school library tapping away until he takes a drink from a thermos and collapses. Eli dies well before anyone can help him, and it turns out the drink was spiked with peanuts, to which Eli was allergic. Throughout the movie writer Sandra Bailey has led us to believe that the culprit is Scott, until about two-thirds of the way through, when he turns up in his car in the garage of Jane’s house. The car is running and filling the space with carbon monoxide, and when Hannah tries to rescue him she finds a suicide note on his phone. (At this point I joked to my husband Charles, who had joined me half an hour into Catfish Killer after returning home from work, that this high school was turning into Cabot Cove, Maine, the locale of the TV series Murder, She Wrote. Charles said his problem with the show was that Cabot Cove was such a small town he couldn’t believe there was still anybody there who hadn’t been murdered after a season or two. Maybe that’s why the Murder, She Wrote writers started taking Jessica Fletcher, played marvelously by Angela Lansbury, out of town and having her find murders to solve wherever she went.) Most of the dramatis personae end up either dead or in the local hospital; Kevin and Hannah are nearly run down by a car, and while her injuries are minor, his are severe enough to sideline him for the rest of the football season. When Kevin is released, Hannah spots him on campus kissing and necking with another girl; he says he never told her they’d be exclusive, and she dumps him (which might cause some household tensions since her mom is still dating Kevin’s dad).

In the end it turns out the real culprit is [spoiler alert!] Jane, Hannah’s best friend, who was second runner-up for the Kinzer scholarship. She was desperate to attend Kinzer because both her parents went there, and indeed that was where they met. Only Jane couldn’t afford to attend Kinzer without a scholarship because she didn’t qualIfy for financial aid due to her stepfather’s money, even though he’d made it clear that once she turned 18 she’d be on her own with no money and no place to live. Once again, as in The Plot to Kill My Mother, a Lifetime villainess seemed self-controlled and calm throughout the running time of the movie, only to turn floridly crazy in the final reel, and in the end Jane confronts both Hannah and Marianne. Jane incapacitated Marianne but Hannah knocks her out and thus saves her mom, while Jane is arrested. Director Olivia Kuan turns in some nice Gothic atmospherics and gets a few neo-noir compositions even into a relatively sterile environment, and at the end Hannah visits Scott in the hospital (he wasn’t dead after all, just incapacitated) and they decide they feel “that way” about each other after all. Catfish Killer probably would have seemed better than it did after The Plot to Kill My Mother – the gimmick of having the heroine’s girlfriend turn out to be the villainess in both films weakened each one – and I certainly thought Daniel Grogan was sexier than Anthony Carro, though the darkly handsome Jason Marrs did more for me in the looks department than either of the others!