Chaos on the Farm (Fade to Black Films, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night (Sunday, April 16) at 8 my husband Charles and I watched Chaos on the Farm, a pretty standard-issue Lifetime movie that in some ways was a relief after the impressive but leavy-handed Drunk, Driving and 17 we’d watched the night before. It was pretty typical Lifetime sleaze: a young couple, Jessica Freeman (Brook Sill) and Samuel “Sam” Richards (Billy Armstrong, an actor with at least a bit more physical and emotional definition than most of Lifetime’s “good” male leads), are living in San Diego (though the locations didn’t look much like San Diego to me) and grieving over the long, slow death from cancer of Jessica’s mother Betty. Jessica’s only surviving relatives – at least so far as she knows – are Betty’s sister Susan and her husband Lawrence, both of whom live together on a farm out in the country. Jessica has a check for a substantial sum of money made out to Susan and Lawrence, and rather than entrust it to the mails she decides to take a trip and give it to them in person even though she hasn’t seen either of them since her childhood. They spend the long hours on the road listening to podcasts. And Sam is frustrated that when he finally arrives at the farmhouse virtually the entire property is in a dead zone sp he can’t get cell-phone service. The film began with a prologue depicting a man, seen only from behind and clad in farmers’ overalls ()but showing a nice ass under them). Being strangled by an unseen assailant.

Charles read this as a clue sooner than I did that “Susan” (Clara Kramer) and “Lawrence” (Jake Busey, Gary Busey’s son and also an executive producer on the film) are imposters. Lifetime had largely given away the plot in a preview showing Sam being tortured by “Lawrence” and ordered to tell him the whereabouts of the money, but I had at first thought this would mean that Aunt Susan and Uncle Lawrence were themselves nasty people after not only the share of Betty’s estate they’d inherited legally, but all of it. No-o-o-o-o: the “Freemans” we see (it’s an obvious mistake on the part of screenwriters Derek Sulek, who also directed, and Eric Durham, to give the farmer couple the same last name as Jessica, given that they’re only supposed to be maternal relatives and therefore shouldn’t have the same last name) were just a criminal couple n the run, a sort of modern-dress middle-aged version of Bonnie and Clyde. They killed the real Lawrence and Susan just to use the farmhouse as a hiding place from the law and only later learned that their victims had had a substantial inheritance coming to them and they decided to stick around long enough to collect it.

Sujek and Durham drop some clever hints that the “farm” couple aren’t who they say they are, including their claim that they’ve “retired” from farming as their explanation of why no farm activity actually seems to be going on on their supposed land. Sam has listened to podcasts about agriculture and tries to show off what he’s learned about it, but the imposters couldn’t be less interested in it. They also have “Lawrence” make a big to-do about forbidding the couple from sleeping in the same bed since they’re not legally married to each other, and he watches Sam and Jessica through a cracked-open door as they break his edicts and have sex with each other.. Midway through the film Sulek and Durham introduce another character, a young and pretty obviously drug-addicted thug who comes to town, holds up the local general store and thus attracts the attention of Hank (Dorian Gregory), the local sheriff’s deputy and seemingly the only law-enforcement officer around for miles. The thug comes by the farmhouse and greets “Lawrence” by another name, indicating that they knew each other, but “Lawrence” doesn’t what the guy around and kills him after the thug drives his car to the back of the property on "Lawrence’s” order. “Lawrence” then throws a tarp over the car and leaves it there until Jessica accidentally stumbles across the body. She noticed the car with a tarp over it, lifted the tarp, opened the car door and the thug’s body spilled out.

Meanwhile, “Lawrence” is torturing Sam to find out where the inheritance check is; he and “Susan” threaten his fingers, she with a pair of pliers and he with a kitchen knife with which he says he’ll cut off one of Sam’s fingers for every “wrong” answer he receives. Sam, not surprisingly, wimps out and reveals the whereabouts of the inheritance check (ya remember the inheritance check?) in answer to “Lawrence”’s first question. Jessica tries to get her and Sam to leave immediately, but they run afoul of “Lawrence”, who seems to have an almost supernatural ability to anticipate their plans and foil them. Those include disconnecting the batteries of virtually every motor vehicle on the property. Jessica tries to call 911 on the house phone but “Lawrence” cuts the lien in mid-call, and when the police finally figure it out Hank shows up – only “Lawrence” spears the hapless sheriff’s deputy to death with a farm implement after daring Hank to shoot him. (Charles said that the cop should have shot him, and I was tempted to reply, “He can’t just kill the guy! The guy isn’t Black!”) This looks like another mistake on the part of Sutek and Durham, since surely the local sheriff’s deputy would have known the real Lawrence and Susan and spotted the criminal couple immediately as impostors.

Jessica tries to make her escape in the sheriff’s car, but “Lawrence” comes on her just as she’s trying to get itstarted, and ultimately the movie ends with “Lawrence” approaching Jessica to first rape and then kill her, only Jessica is able to grab tie brown belt with which “Lawrence” was about to strangle her and strangles him instead. More cops show up (where did they come from?) and arrest “Susan” just as she tries to flee, and it turns out that "Lawrence’s” rean name is Brendan and “Susan’s” is Heidi Cokey (at least I think that’s the name that was spat out on the soundtrack). Chaos on the Farm was a pretty dorky Lifetime movie with even more plot holes than usual, but once again, after the sometimes moving and sometimes just dreadful earnestness of Drunk, Driving and 17, it was a lot of sleazy fun!