Vacation Home Nightmare (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2023)

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

On Sunday, January 29 Lifetime showed a new “premiere” followed by one they had “premiered” the night before and had given a huge ballyhoo to as part of their true-crime series. The Sunday “premiere” was of a film called Vacation Home Nightmare which was pretty much what you’d expect. Danielle Banks (Audrey Reynolds) is in the process of divorcing her husband Craig (not bad-looking Nick Checket) after she caught him in their bed having extra-relational activity with another woman (whom we only see in one brief flashback scene). Danielle is afraid of pissing off Craig since his name is still on her mortgage and he could conceivable do her out of their house of he so chose, but because she’s already int he final stages of dumping the guy legally she yields to the suggestion of her best friends, Alesha (Felicia Cooper) and Hannah (Yolanthe Cabau) to rent a vacation home by the beach. One of the other women even grabs Danielle’s laptop and logs on to the Web site for the company booking the resort home, and I said to my husband Charles, “It’s never a good idea for a woman in a Lifetime movie to let her best friend sign her up for an app she’s never heard of before.” Sure enough, the women find themselves tormented by a mysterious man in a ski mask. They go out long enough to cruise the beach, and specifically to cruise three hot young guys playing volleyball, and Danielle takes the hottest of the three guys, Jack Casey (Christopher Sky), to the villa with her and it looks like they’re going to get it on on the spot.

They make arrangements for a date the next day – though Danielle is careful not to call it a “date” – only the mystery guy in a ski mask gets into Jack’s house that night and kills him. When Danielle waits for him on their non-date and he doesn’t show up,she naturally assumes he stood her up. But she’s got other things on her mind: the ski-masked assailant has tried to rape her in the vacation rental and she angrily moves out and demands her money back. The rental agents turn out to be two pretty smarmy guys, Anton King (Justin Berti) and his assistant Michael Snyder (Grant Wright Gunderson). It doesn’t take long for director Linsday Hartley (who’s best known as an actress) and writer John F. Hayes to reveal that Anton is the mystery killer in the ski mask, and Michael is his gu9ilt-ridden sidekick who’s covered up for him for years. This also explains the odd prologue scene in which Anton strangled to death an unknown woman who later turned out to be Linda Winter, the original owner of the vacation home, which Anton somehow got away from her estate legally after he killed her. Anton outfitted the place with an elaborate series of hidden cameras and microphones so he could see and hear what was going on in there 24/7, and he’s also able to plant bugs in Danielle’s handbag and on her car so he can keep track of her movements.

Damoelle’s attempted rape case is assigned to a Black woman detective named Gwen Greer (Anastacia McPherson), who immediately assume Jack was the killer until his body is discovered, whereupon she next points the finger of suspicion on Craig until he has an airtight alibi. Meanwhile, Craig’s bimbo has thrown him out – in the one flashback scene I mentioned earlier, he bolted from her place after she demanded he impregnate her and he, obviously not wanting to be stuck with the task of parenthood, refused – and he tries to move back in with Danielle, much to her distress. Then Anton sneaks into his home (this is yet another Lifetime movie in which the villains seem to have an almost supernatural ability to get in places where they’re not supposed to be) and poisons him, then grabs a hunk of his hair and plants it in Dnaielle’s car in an apparent attempt to frame her for the murder of her husband. Anton also murders his sidekick Michael after Michael discovers too much about Anton’s past.

Ultimately, after Anton kidnaps Hannah and holds her at knifepoint to lure Danielle to a meeting, he explains his motive: he wanted to punish Danielle for having an adulterous relationship with Jack (even though she never actually made it to bed with Jack and she was only technically married to Craig at that point). The three women confront Anton, grab his knife and shove him into the swimming pool at the resort home, from which we don’t see him emerge: are we supposed to believe he drowned because he couldn’t swim? Or were Hartley and Hayes deliberately making the ending ambiguous because they wanted to leave open the possibility of bringing Anton back for a sequel? It’s true that the man generally regarded as the greatest suspense-film director of all time, Alfred Hitchcock, regularly let the audience know who the villain was from the get-go – he achieved suspense by making us wonder when the characters would find out who the bad guy was and what would happen to them when they did – but Lindsay Hartley, though a capable director of the sorts of stories Lifetime’s and Hallmark’s producers give her, is no Hitchcock, and Hayes isn’t in the same league as Hitchcock’s writers, either. Vacation Home Nightmare is just another formula Lifetime movie, with a banal title all too accurately describing its ultra-predictable contents.