My Sister's Serial Killer Boyfriend (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night my husband Charles and I watched a couple of TV-movies on Lifetime, now that Lifetime has abandoned the treacly Hallmark-style holiday movies that clog up their schedule and gone back to what they do best: what New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd called “pussies in peril.” The first one was called My Sister’s Serial Killer Boyfriend – which is so typical a Lifetime title one only expects it to be followed by, “ … She Met Online,” though in fact this pussy in peril, Olivia (Revell Carpenter), doesn’t meet her tormentor online but rather through taking a self-defense class from him. The person who persuades her to take the class is her sister Maddie (Brianna Cohen) – incidentally they’re supposed to be sisters but we’re never given a last name for them, which I found a bit disorienting – and though one of my pet peeves in movies is when we’re told two people are biologically related and they don’t look the slightest bit like each other, this film’s casting director, Jeff Hardwick, erred in the other direction. Brianna Cohen and Revell Carpenter look so much alike it’s hard to tell Maddie and Olivia apart; the only reliable indicator is that Cohen’s heir is a bit more curly than Carpenter’s. The film begins with a prologue showing the characters as children in the park watching over their younger sister Andrea – only they turn away from her for a few minutes and when they return, Andrea has been kidnapped by a mostery man in a white pickup. The only things we see of the man are the dirty grey hoodie he’s wearing and the back end of his pickup, but he speeds away. Andrea’s body is eventually found; we know that because in the modern part of the story, her two older sisters regularly visit her grave.

Flash-forward to present-day Atlanta, Georgia, where Maddie works as a journalist and her editor, Rachel Jones (Denise Hewitt), wants her to cover exclusively local news like the opening of a new city park. Of course Maddie wants to do investigative reporting, and she’s got a lead on a case: she’s convinced that the man responsible for mysterious disappearances of young, attractive, independent women throughout Georgia is a serial killer. What’s more, she’s convinced by the trajectory of his previous crimes that he’s working his way down the state to Atlanta, and he’ll strike there next. She pitches this story to Rachel, who turns it down, but she’s got an ally: the paper’s information technology guy, a young and very hot-looking Black man named Kyle Johnson (Christian Blaque Meier) who helps her do computer searches for the elusive “Haden Carmichael” (Rib Hillis), the tall, young man who teaches Olivia’s self-defense class and whom she’s beginning to date. Maddie becomes more and more convinced that Haden is the mysterious serial killer she’s trying to track down – especially since he seems to have no presence on social media – and, despite throwing a red herring in the person of Jack Houston (Don Jeanes), whom Maddie meets through an online dating service and who pins her up against a wall and has sex with her on their first date, enough that in what looks an awful lot like rape – midway through writer Andrea Shawcross and director Danny J. Boyle (decidedly not the same person who made Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting) reveal to the audience that Haden is the killer.

He murders Kyle – though he’s a man instead of a woman, he takes on the traditional Lifetime role of The Heroine’s African-American Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot But Gets Killed Before He Can Warn Her – and also Olivia’s asshole landlord (isn’t that redundant?), Todd Young (Steve Olson, who’s quite good-looking himself, so much so I was briefly wondering if he would turn out to be the villain), before he scoops up Olivia for what he tells her is a two-day weekend at his family’s old place in Vidalia. Of course, we know he has no intention of ever letting her leave the place alive, but Maddie is determined to track him with the few shards of evidence she has. She’s helped by a convenience-store owner named Charlie (Gregory M. Mitchell, the only Black character besides Kyle in this story), who recognized “Haden” under one of his previous names, “David” – though the villain’s true name turns out to be Michael Dunning, and he’s determined to replay the most traumatnc breakup of his life with woman after woman whom he feels compelled to kill in every case. Michael a.k.a. David a.k.a. Haden catches Maddie trying to break into his place in Vidaia to rescue her sister. He ties them both up and shoots Jack Houston, who in an earlier scene turned out to be not only Maddie’s trick from the bar but a police detective co-assigned to the case with his partner, a woman detective named Willet (Erica Orr). We saw him in an earlier scene interrogating Maddie about one of the murders, for which they suspect Olivia, and later he admits he got a dressing-down from the head of the Atlanta Police homicide department for dating a suspect (a bit unfairly because Maddie wasn’t a suspect yet, and the murder of which she will be suspected hadn’t happened).

Only as soon as he enters the house, Michael/David/Haden surprises him and shoots him, rendering him unconscious (though not dead, thank goodness!), and it’s left to Olivia to grab Jack Houston’s gun and drill the bad guy with two perfectly placed shots to his chest. (There’s been no intimation before this that Olivia knows anything about shooting; at least Alfred Hitchcock and his writers, Charles Bennett and D. b. Wyndham-Lewis, established in the first reel of the 1934 The Man Who Knew Too Much that their heroine was a crack shot, so we could believe that in the last reel she could pick off the baddie holding her daughter hostage without harming the daughter.) In the end Rachel gives Maddie her job back after having fired her, and Jack shows up at the home of Maddie and Olivia obviously intent on pursuing a serious relationship with Maddie. My Sister’s Serial Killer Boyfriend was from the Johnson Production Group and had familiar names on the credits, including Ken sanders and J. Bryan Dick as producers. It’s a pretty typical by-the-numbers Lifetime thriller, entertaining but nothing special.