My Landlord Wants to Kill Me (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2023)

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

After that Lifetime showed a movie whose very title is a “spoiler”: My Landlord Wants to Kill Me. Directed by Farah White (a woman, and like Haylie Duff an actress-turned-director) from a script by Richard Dane Scott, My Landlord Wants to Kill Me stars Emily Roslyn Villareal as Madeline “Maddie” Evans. She just dropped out of college after the pre-med courses she was taking to become a nurse were too much for her, and she goes to the home of her aunt, Grace Bell (Anzu Lawson), because Grace is a professional photographer and Maddie has decided she wants to pursue a career as a photographer, too. Unfortunately Grace is married to Paul (Roy Abramsohn), the titular killer landlord, and though Grace talks Paul into letting Maddie stay there rent-free while Grace goes off to Africa for an assignment, Paul is obviously not happy about it. While there Maddie meets and immediately gets the hots for Kevin (Joey Heyworth), a boyishly handsome young man who’s a neighbor of Grace and Paul. The house where Maddie is living doesn’t have a wi-fi Internet connection (or any Internet connection at all), and the cell-phone service that far in the boondocks is spotty at best, but they have a landline with a rotary-dial phone. There’s a nice joke in Scott’s script that Maddie remembers seeing rotary-dial phones – in a documentary on the History Channel. Unfortunately, though Paul wasn’t supposed to be there while Maddie was using the house, he keeps turning up unexpectedly while she’s there and butting in – when he’s not spying on her through the windows and stalking the place in the black hoodie that’s become the standard attire for Lifetime villains. Maddie uses the phone to call her best friend, Layla (Lauren Vaz), and the moment we see her and realize she’s African-American it’s clear writer Scott is setting her up to be The Heroine’s Black Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot But Gets Killed Before She Can Warn Her.

There’s also a brief confrontation scene between Paul and cutie-pie Kevin that briefly made me wonder if Kevin was part of Paul’s plot and the two were working together – after all, guys as cute as Joey Heyworth in Lifetime movies are usually playing villains – but no-o-o-o-o. And there’s the sinister master bedroom which Paul has ordered Maddie not to use, and indeed he keeps it locked at all times and the key for it isn’t on the set of keys left behind for Maddie’s use. Like Judith in the Bluebeard legend, Maddie is overcome with curiosity as to just what’s in that room, and eventually Kevin picks the lock one night while he’s there and the two make love in Paul’s and Grace’s bed …while Paul looks on from outside. (Fortunately we get a hot soft-core porn scene between Joey Heyworth and Emily Roslyn Villareal that’s quite the most entertaining thing about this movie.) There’s also Paul’s insistence that the house’s thermostat be set no higher than 65 degrees; periodically Maddie sets it higher and Paul sneaks in and turns it back down again. The entire intrigue turns out to revolve around Kaycee Arwin (Clara Carlo), a young woman Grace hired a year or two earlier as a model. Kaycee was sufficiently attractive she ended up having an affair with Kevin, but Paul also got a crush on her, and when he came on to her and she reminded him that he was married, he said, in the classic manner of all husbands seeking extra-relational activities in made-for-TV movies, “That’s been over for years.” Paul eventually got into an argument with Kaycee and ultimately strangled her – we’ve guessed pretty early on that Paul killed her but everyone else in the story just thinks Kaycee disappeared and went back home to New Orleans. What makes this film unusually macabre is what Paul’s done with her body after he killed her: he’s kept her wrapped in plastic and preserved in a basement whose entrance is a trap door under his bed, and he continues to have sex with her even well after she’s dead. (I’ve seen a lot of Lifetime movies, but this is the first one I can recall that features necrophilia.) At least that explains why he insists on keeping the house so damned cold, though I would think that even at 65 degrees Kaycee’s body would start stinking pretty soon!

Ultimately Paul manages to dispatch virtually the entire cast; he stalks Layla to her city apartment and kills her there with an overdose of chloroform, and he stabs Kevin to death and leaves Maddie to discover the body. (I was hoping Richard Dane Scott would at least keep Kevin alive and have him and Maddie get together at the end.) Grace – ya remember Grace? – comes home from Africa just in time to see Paul being arrested for murder, Kevin and Layla dead at his hands and Maddie bereft, but there’s a tag scene heralded by a chyron, “Six Months Later.” Six months later Grace and Maddie are giving a joint exhibit of their photographs, and pride of place in the exhibit goes to the photos of Kaycee, Kevin and Layla, all Paul’s victims. Grace gently urges Maddie to go back to nursing school, but Maddie says she’s found a small college which teaches photography and she’d like to go there. The End. My Landlord Wants to Kill Me has some good moments – I especially liked the decision to make the dastardly villain homely instead of drop-dead gorgeous like most male Lifetime bad guys (and motivated largely by his homeliness) – but, though I criticized Kabby Borders in The Neighbors Are Watching for weak acting, Emily Roslyn Villareal makes Borders look like Meryl Streep by comparison. The rest of the acting is passable, though I think writer Scott deliberately wanted to keep Paul enigmatic and therefore gave Roy Abramsohn little to work with in terms of building a character. And as far as actresses-turned-directors are concerned, Farah White is hardly in Haylie Duff’s league!