Amish Stud: The Eli Weaver Story (Milojo Productions, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Had I not liked An Amish Sin so much, I probably would have taken more kindly to the next Amish-themed movie Lifetime showed, Amish Stud: The Eli Weaver Story. This was a Lifetime “premiere” and, even more than An Amish Sin, it was based on a true story: the conspiracy between Eli Weaver (Luke Macfarlane) and his paramour Barbara “Barb” Raber (Kirsten Vangsness) to kill Eli’s wife Barbara Weaver (Miranda MacDougall). Lifetime had been hyping this pretty relentlessly over the last week or two, and it was obvious they were hoping that the clash between “Amish” and “Stud” would attract curious viewers. It worked for me, even though it was also the tag line the real Eli Weaver used when he went on dating apps and advertised himself as available to all and sundry who were alive, human and female. The film opens in 1999, in a bedroom where Barbara Weaver and her sister Abigail (Claire Filipow) are lying awake in twin beds. Barbara is a devotée of romance novels in general and the nearly pornographic “bodice ripper” kind in particular, and Abigail kids her about that and Barbara’s fantasies of having a real-life husband as hot as the guys in those books. Barbara is dating Eli Weaver and rationalizing that since his father and brother are both Amish ministers, he’ll be solidly moral as well as a “good catch” by the standards of the community. Wrong on both counts: Eli is a sexual compulsive who’s constantly on the prowl. He gets a bootleg cell phone from Barbara Raber – she sneaks it to him by putting it on her “family plan” – and uses it to go on dating sites. For a few months he even leaves the Amish community and lives outside with a young, vibrantly sexy Black woman named Laura Kelly (alas, the actress playing her is not yet listed on imdb.com), only to return to the fold.

His dad tells him that in order to win his way back to the good graces of Amishville he’ll have to sell his truck (remember both cars and phones are big bozo-no-nos in Amishworld), though dad will not only buy a house on the Amish compound for Eli, Barbara and their five children, he’ll also give Eli seed money to start a small store selling fishing gear and guns to both Amish and non-Amish customers. Eli returns to his double life, ending up in semi-serious long-term affairs with at least two women – Tamara Jones (Karolina Cubitt), a petite woman with short dark hair who’s raising at least two kids as a single mom; and Barb Raber, who’s blonde, zaftig and to our minds definitely a step down from the far sexier (at least by conventional standards) Barbara Weaver. In 2009, when Barbara Weaver is found dead in her bedroom of a single shotgun wound to the chest, the police officers sent to investigate, Detectives Maxwell (Mark Krysko) and Harley (Ryder Miller), are momentarily nonplussed at the hostility they get from the Amish – as in An Amish Sin, the attitude of the community members towards the cops is, “We don’t need outside law enforcement; we take care of our own” – and Harley is also surprised when the Amish refer to him as “English.” Maxwell explains to him that “English” is just the Amish’s generic term for non-Amish people, whatever their actual ethnicity. Amish Stud, directed by Stacey Taylor (a woman) and written by Kim Izzo and Hunter Smith, shows the cops’ befuddlement at the Amish people’s resistance to their investigation even though the crime they’re investigating is the murder of one of their own. The only help they get from inside Amishland is from Abigail, who’s convinced Eli murdered Barbara so he could continue his multiple-partner lifestyle.

Eli’s elaborate façade started to unravel one morning when he cornered Barbara in their kitchen and demanded, as part of an Amish wife’s duty to submit to her husband, that she give him a blow job. She was totally disgusted at the whole idea – I’m presuming because the Amish, like Right-wing Christians generally, believe the only licit purpose for sex is reproduction and any sex that doesn’t contain the possibility of conception is immoral and wrong (one of the reasons they’re so down on homosexuality as well as birth control) – so much so that we see her in the office of a therapist. Presumably the therapist is non-Amish because he’s dressed in normal clothes and doesn’t have either a moustache or a beard (Amish men are encouraged, though not required, to have beards but they’re forbidden to grow moustaches because supposedly that reminds them too much of the military, and the Amish are pacifists). He advises Barbara to keep a journal and record all Eli’s transgressions, both his unseemly sexual demands on her and his affairs with other women. Then Barbara walks in on Eli’s store during business hours and there’s Eli pinning Barbara Rader against the wall and fucking her behind the store counter. Eli and Barbara Rader frantically pull their pants back on and Barbara Weaver is determined to report Eli to the church authorities the next day.

Eli has already been soliciting his other girlfriends for help in offing his no-longer-convenient wife. Fortunately, Tamara Jones treated it as a joke, but Barbara Rader let Eli talk her into conspiring to kill Barbara Weaver, and one morning while Eli and his best male buddy were going out on a fishing trip, Barbara Rader sneaks into Eli’s home (via a door he’s left unlocked for her) with one of the shotguns from Eli’s store stock, and kills Barbara Weaver. The cops are stumped until Abigail finds Barbara Weaver’s old journals and turns them over to law enforcement, whereupon the journals give them Eli’s motive as well as important information. They also get a statement from Eli’s fishing buddy that Eli tried to get him to lie and furnish Eli an alibi by saying he spoke to Barbara on the morning of the trip. Eventually the cops arrest both Eli and Barbara Rader for the murder of Barbara Weaver, though Eli, scumbag to the last, turns state’s evidence on Rader and so she’s convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison while he only gets 15 years and is eligible for parole in 2024. The film ends with one of those bizarre open-ended scenes Lifetime’s writers have become addicted to: Eli, in prison, flirts with the woman running the prison commissary and gets her to sneak him a bag of candy even though he doesn’t have the money in his prison account to pay for it.

Amish Stud doesn’t have anywhere near the subtlety or moral complexity of An Amish Sin, but on its own it’s good clean sleazy fun in the best Lifetime tradition, powered by a strong performance by Luke Macfarlane as Eli; whether in Amish garb or normal 21st-century American dress, he’s hot and sexy as all hell, and it’s easy to see why so many women are attracted to him. He also makes the character totally believable as the narcissistic scumbag he is, and we get an ample amount of soft-core porn featuring him with his various girlfriends just to add appeal to this already entertaining film. Still, I had a queasy feeling about both movies’ appeal to viewers alternately disgusted and thrilled by depictions of sexually repressed communities. As James Agee wrote in his review of the 1947 film Black Narcissus, “Barring perhaps one in any hundred who willingly practice it, I think celibacy is of itself faintly obscene; so I admire still less the dramatic exploitation of celibacy as an opportunity for titillation in the best of taste.” There’s a lot of potential for drama in the clash between the imposition of extreme sexual repression in certain communities and the natural human drives of their members, as witness all the hard-line ministers who have been caught having wild sex lives with women (or, in some cases, men). The plot lines of these movies, Amish Stud in particular, could have exploited those tensions more subtly and impactfully than they did, but the makers of An Amish Sin did a great job of dramatizing the clashes between the values of a traditionalist religious community and the normal adolescent drives of a woman “coming of age” both physically and intellectually. As for Amish Stud, it at least gives us an inkling of the sort of double life a man whose sexuality is too expansive to be confined in just one relationship is condemned to in a society even more repressive and less tolerant of multi-partner lifestyles than “normal” America.