Murder at the Country Club, a.k.a. Country Club Scandal (RNR Media, Reel One Entertainment, Georgia Film and Television Office, PeachTree Post, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Murder at the Country Club didn’t have the imprimatur of a true story (however chopped and channeled), but it was good, sleazy fun and actually more entertaining than Stolen Baby: The Murder of Heidi Broussard. It’s all about the Pinecrest Country Club in Gateway, a town in west Georgia (the Georgia Film Office supported this production even though the script isn’t very flattering to the state), where Cassie Randolph (Alex Mitchell) has just taken a new job. She got the gig largely because her father Brad (Donald Ome) is an influential long-time member and he pulled a few strings. (Incidentally Brad’s last name is spelled “Randolf” on the film’s imdb.com page, but in the final shot we see Cassie’s name on a newspaper byline and it’s the usual spelling, “Randolph.”) Cassie got hired in the first place to replace a woman named Lisa Harkin, who discovered evidence of embezzlement from the club by its newly elected president, Frank Sanders (a marvelous villain performance by Adam Harper) but has since mysterioiusly disappeared. Cassie’s direct supervisor is a woman named Ava Worth (Layla Cushman), who’s having an extra-relational affair with Frank – the two aren’t particularly discreet about it, emerging from his office and quickly rebuttoning their clothes after a sexual quickie. It turns out Frank is also a practiced embezzler, getting himself appointed to run successful enterprises, looting them for his personal gain and then driving them into bankruptcy. Cassie is living with a boyfriend who’s an investigative reporter for the Gateway Gazette – whose irascible editor, a character “type” one seems to have stepped in from a 1930’s screwball comedy (even though the “paper” seems to publish only online), keeps telling him that a) he doesn’t have enough evidence for a story about the skullduggery at the Pinecrest Country Club, and b) even if he did, no one cares about a bunch of rich people screwing each other over financially.

There’s also a quartet of hot-looking young men who work at the club as golf caddies: Milo (Cody Kahaku), Jeb (Dilon Ballard), Owen (Cade Gass) and Jamie (Kyle Findley). They all live together in what amounts to a bachelor pad on the premises, though this causes the predictable problems when one of them has a date with a woman and wants to invite her over (not that we ever get to see this happen, more’s the pity). Milo attempts to organize the others to go on strike during the upcoming big golf tournament that supplies the club’s largest source of income, but the other three beg off and say that even though the new Frank Sanders management has just cut their pay by 20 percent, they’re still willing to accept it rather than risk losing their jobs altogether. Jeb is Frank Sanders’ personal caddy and he’s become a double agent, reporting on the activities of the office staff whenever they get too close to finding out the truth about Frank’s criminal activities. The film opens with a confusing prologue that made it seem like Lisa Harkin was another one of Frank’s paramours, only they got into a fight, he knocked her over and accidentally killed her. It turns out later that Ava was the woman who was with Frank last night, that she was demanding they have sex outdoors on the Pinecrest grounds, and she spotted Lisa and killed her on purpose because Lisa had prepared a two-page document detailing the embezzlements and the offshore accounts Frank and Ava had created to hide the money. Much of the suspense around the story is about Cassie’s attempts to print out this document, which keep getting stymied first by the password protection on Lisa’s account (though in the climactic scene Cassie is able to print it out without being asked for a password, and writer Michael M. Scott never explains how she was able to manage it), then by the printer mysteriously being declared “out of order” when it isn’t, and finally by Ava, who turns out [spoiler alert!] to be the real brains behind the operation.

It was Ava who killed Lisa when she discovered her and Frank on the club grounds, and Ava also ran over Milo and Lisa’s sister Tracy (Alex Bowling) in separate auto “accidents” once they were about to meet with Cassie and spill the beans about what they knew. Ultimately Cassie gets fired from her job but she’s able to get back into the club anyway – for some reason no one asked her to return her keys – and print out Lisa’s document. Alas, she’s discovered by Frank and Ava, who had sneaked into the office building for one of their sexual encounters (ironically, he would rather do it in a hotel room and it’s she who wants the added thrill of having their trysts in potentially dangerous places), and Ava pulls out a gun and shoots Frank because she never really wanted him, just the money. At this point one wonders who’s going to play the role of the Seventh Cavalry coming in and changing the situation for the better, rescuing Cassie and giving Ava and Frank what they deserve. The Seventh Cavalry or deus ex machina character turns out to be Tracy Harkin, who overpowers Ava and threatens to strangle her out of revenge for killing her sister Lisa. Only Cassie is able to talk her out of it and point out that turning Ava over to the law is a better alternative than making herself a murderess. Ultimately Ava and Frank are arrested, and Cassie gets her byline on the Gateway Gazette article exposing the fraud and scandal at the Pinecrest Country Club even though it’s supposed to be her boyfriend who’s the investigative reporter. Murder at the Country Club is a good bit of Lifetime’s usual sleazy fun – though some soft-core porn scenes between Ava and Frank, or better yet between Ava and one of the young caddies, would have helped. It’s effectively directed by Dave Thomas, who has enough of a reputation that, instead of reading “Directed by Dave Thomas,” his credit says, “A Dave Thomas Film.” Thomas began his career as a documentarian doing an award-winning film on the history of emergency rooms (which may explain why so much of Murder at the Country Club takes place in hospitals), and he also made the recent Lifetime movie The Paramedic Who Stalked Me, which I thought was quite a bit sillier than this!