Alas, the second movie Lifetime showed last night (April 1), a “premiere” called Stalked by Her Past, wasn’t anywhere nearly as good. It had a similar plot line – a young Black actress named Tanya Moore (Meta Golding) is being mysteriously stalked by someone who calls her regularly, running their voice through an encoder so she can’t even tell whether the person harassing her is male or female. Tanya flees Los Angeles after a prop on her latest movie is rigged to potentially kill her, and she flees to her old home town and movies in with her half-sister Shelly (Tationna Bosier), While back home Tanya starts an affair with Devon (Christian Keyes), a young man who she knew in high school and who had an unrequited crush on Tanya then even though Tanya thought Shelly was the girl he was really interested in. Tanya also had a 12-year-old illegitimate daughter, product of an affair she had in college with a heavy-set white professor, whom she turned over to her own mother to raise, Now that’s coming to an end because mom is terminally ill and Tanya will have to make other arrangements. Also in the character mix is Marcus Thompson, a young man in high school with whom Tanya had a one-night stand and who never forgot about her; and Latoya Johnson (Jessica Fontaine), who never got over her jealousy of Tanya when Tanya beat out Latoya for all the good parts in their high-school drama classes. Midway through the action Tanya receives reports that an arsonist burned down her home in L.A.
Marcus turns out to have a secret room with posters,clippings and photos of Tanya plastered on its walls, the typical indicia of movie obsession, and when he ends up dead (though I can’t quite remember whether someone else shot him or he killed himself) Tanya, Shelly and Riley (Isabelle Du),Tanya’s agent who’s come out from Hollywood with a pile of three scripts she wants Tanya to choose from for her next project, assume that wth Marcdus dead the threat to Tanya is over, but it isn’t. This time writer Scott Mullen has decided [spoiler alert!] actually to make Devon the real culprit – he’s never forgiven Tanya for passing him over in high school and concocted the whole plot to get back at her, a lousy ending the authors of Every breath She Takes wisely avoided. What’s more, director Bobby Yan is hardly in the same skill league as Every Breath You Take’s director, Darin Scott; scenes that in Scott’s hands were suspenseful and scary turn flat, dull and ordinary in Yon’s. Stalked by Her Past is an example of a movie that looked great in its promos but was disappointing when actually screened, and it didn’t help that it wasn’t listed on imdb.com, though I found another Web site that has a mostly full listing for the cast (except the actors who played Marcus and Adam, Tanya’s co-star and live-in boyfriend until she dumps him in the opening scene for having had extra-relational activities with another woman and for some reason copied it to his cell phone; when she throws him out a posse of media people are gathered outside her door) and crew.
