The Paramedic Who Stalked Me (Storyteller Studios, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night (Sunday, September 10) I watched two Lifetime movies, Lust, Lies and Polygamy and one whose title seems to be the result of people sitting around a writers’ room table brainstorming titles for really stupid and silly Lifetime movies: The Paramedic Who Stalked Me. The stalkee is Chloe Braddock (Lexi Minetree), who sneaks out of the home she shares with her mother, realtor Karen Braddock (Maeve Quinlan), to go out one evening with her boyfriend, Bryce Davis (the genuinely cute and hunky Nick Clark), and their friends Lexi (Danielle Madison) and Todd (Ryan Paynter). Only a drunk driver, John Talbot (Allen Burns), goes out in his truck while several sheets to the proverbial wind and crashes into the teens. Todd, who was driving, is killed in the crash, Bryce and Lexi survive with minor injuries but Chloe needs oxygen to revive. She gets it from the stalker, emergency medical technician Matt Landrus (Andrew Spach), who’s infatuated with her the moment he lays eyes on her. Matt works as a paramedic with a professional partner named Sharice (Erica J. Orr), a tall, leggy, butch-looking Black woman. Matt became an EMT in the first place because 13 years earlier, in 2010, his prom date with girlfriend Hayley Stillwell (Anne-Marie Kennedy – we never see her except in surviving still photos but we see enough of them they needed an actress to “play” her) ended in tragedy when they, too, were hit by a drunk driver and Hayley was killed. Matt survived and, according to an expository flashback from Hayley’s father (Donald Ome), decided then and there to become an EMT himself in hopes of saving other people’s lives – only something curdled in his heart and instead of saving people, he went crazy and started obsessing about them, especially young women who more or less resembled Hayley. Matt is particularly attracted to Chloe because when he rescued her she was wearing a necklace with a pendant identical to the one Hayley was wearing the night she died – and Chloe’s pendant was a gift from Bryce as Hayley’s was from Matt.

Matt not only obsesses about Chloe, including using a wax key-molding kit to copy her house key so he can come and go in her home any time he likes, he also decides to get rid of the competition. First he sneaks into the hospital and knocks off John Talbot with an injection of a lethal drug that causes quite a lot of pain just before it kills. Then he spikes Bryce’s vape pen with oxycodone and other prescription medications he’s got on hand in his van, and though Bryce survives the O.D. he’s hospitalized and ends up in a coma for several days. While he’s “out” Matt sneaks into the hospital again to smother Bryce with a pillow, but just then Chloe happens to walk into his room to hang out (even though he’s oblivious to her) and Matt puts down the pillow with which he was going to kill him and pretends he was only there to make him more comfortable. When Matt’s van partner Sharice starts to get suspicious of him because she’s finally put two and two together and realized the reason their drug counts keep coming up short is because he’s stealing them, he fakes a call to lure their ambulance to a deserted stretch of road and stabs Sharice to death (a real shame because she was by far the most interesting character in the story), then ransacks the inside of the van to make it look like they were ambushed by drug dealers out to steal their supply of narcotics. Like Lust, Love and Polygamy, The Paramedic Who Stalked Me suffers from the lack of a truly interesting villain; Andrew Spach isn’t a particularly exciting-looking man (a far cry from the drop-dead gorgeous actors who usually play Lifetime’s bad guys) and he’s at once too crazy to be credible and too bland to be genuinely frightening. The film was directed by Dave Thomas and written by Daniel West, who utterly fails to make Matt either evil or pathetic (in the good sense) despite his attempt at a “Rosebud” moment in his loss of Hayley. The finale takes place at Mosier High School, which Matt attended 13 years earlier and Chloe and Bryce go to now, in the gym which Matt has redecorated as if for a prom. Matt has brought along a boom box with which to play the records of 13 years earlier so he can reproduce with Chloe the prom he went to with Hayley all those years before, and he gets her to dance with him – only she grabs the boom box and clubs him with it, setting up a well-staged chase scene through the deserted gym.

Meanwhile, Karen has recovered from Matt’s attempt to ambush her – he called her pretending to be a woman interested in buying one of the houses Karen lists and tried to administer a lethal drug to her, only They Both Reached for the Syringe and Matt ultimately threw her into a nearby ravine and left, thinking he’d killed her that way. Karen climbs out of the ravine and makes her way to the gym after first calling the police (though we don’t see her do that and we only know it because she tells Matt she’s called the police on him and turn up). Ultimately Chloe attacks Matt in self-defense and the next time we see him he’s in a wheelchair in a hospital, and he comes on to one of the nurses thinking she’s the latest incarnation of Hayley – only there’s a dissolve from his fantasy of her to the real thing, in which she’s considerably older and homelier than his hallucination. There are some nice touches in The Paramedic Who Stalked Me, including the character of Matt’s wife, girlfriend, romantic partner or whatever; she looks like an older version of Hayley and how they ended up together is a mystery. But they’re shown having an argument during which she makes it clear she’s tired of his series of obsessive crushes on young women she’s met while saving their lives. There’s also the fact that Andrew Spach and Nick Clark look similar enough one could imagine Bryce as Matt’s younger brother – which suggests some interesting roads-not-taken in Daniel West’s script, including the possibility that he could have had Chloe genuinely attracted to Matt because he resembled an older, more mature version of Bryce. Overall, though, The Paramedic Who Stalked Me is just another routine Lifetime movie, which rips off at least one big scene from Stalked by My Doctor (in which the stalker was Eric Roberts, considerably older than Andrew Spach but also a good deal sexier!) in which the stalker sneaks into the stalkee’s room and falls asleep in her bed, obviously with sexual fantasies about her playing out in his head, then has to beat a hasty retreat when she and her mom come home unexpectedly.