Killing for Extra Credit (CMW Horizon Productions, Reel One Entertainment, Champlain Media, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Surprisingly, the next movie on Lifetime’s March 17, 2024 agenda, Killing for Extra Credit, had strong similarities to Friday Night Sext Scandal even though it was presented as a whodunit. From the promos and the title I’d assumed that it was about a psychopathic student so willing literally to kill for extra-credit points to facilitate their college applications. Instead, “extracredit” (one word) turns out to be an Internet provocateur with a seemingly boundless knowledge base about his fellow students at Lakehills High School, billed as “Home of the Knights!” It starts out as the story of three odd people out from the campus student hierarchy: Marybeth Morris (Matreya Scarrwener – when I saw that name on the credits I joked, “That can be cured, you know”), Sophie Arredondo (Kennedy Rowe) and Ron (unidentified on imdb.com). They’re all starting their senior year and competing to get into good colleges, but Marybeth was forced to withdraw from her campaign for student body president when nude photos of her taken by her then-boyfriend, football team captain Josh Whittaker (Quinten James), were leaked onto the Internet. She was counting on that honor to get the scholarship she needed to go to a college in Washington state where her father attended. Like the leads in Friday Night Sext Scandal, Marybeth is being raised by a single mother, though in her case we definitively know her dad is dead, and she’s very much in his shadow, especially since her mom Lydia (Jessie Fraser) is holding her to her dad’s life path and actively discouraging her from doing anything else. “Extracredit” exposes one girl in school by claiming that her mother isn’t a high-powered attorney, as everyone thought, but a highly paid escort.

“Extracredit” also learns that Sophie was adopted by a rich father, Richard Arredondo (Harrison Coe), and rather than go through a legal adoption agency he essentially purchased her from an illegal broker, sort of the way Christina Crawford said her superstar mom Joan Crawford adopted her in Mommie Dearest. There are three main suspects for the secret identity of “extracredit”: Josh, Ron and the school’s most sympathetic teacher, Miss Mitchell (Amy Trefry). I was starting to suspect the teacher if only because I was flashing back to Blood of Dracula, the 1958 American-International film in which a female high-school student, Nancy Perkins (Sandra Harrison), is hypnotized into becoming a vampire by the one seemingly sympathetic teacher in the school, Miss Branding (Louise Lewis). Miss Mitchell doesn’t turn out to be “extracredit” but she does end up being exposed as a villain; it was she who leaked the nude photos of Marybeth to the Internet and forced her to withdraw from the campaign, so Toby Dandrich (Tyler Cody) – a thoroughly repulsive piece of work who seems destined to grow up to be Donald Trump, though it turns out that instead of being born to money he’s had to work hard and scheme for his big breaks – got elected instead. For a while Marybeth thinks Toby might be “extracredit,” but Toby boasts that if he wanted to ruin someone he’d do it openly instead of hiding behind a screen name. In the meantime Sophie had been found dead outside a so-called “safe space” she and Marybeth had frequently repaired to, and the students mostly assumed she’d committed suicide and had even held a memorial vigil for her – at which Miss Mitchell had attended in disguise and held up signs telling Marybeth to stop looking for the truth about Sophie, which was (among other things) that Miss Mitchell had actually killed her in a scuffle on the rooftop.

It turns out that Miss Mitchell was Sophie’s biological mother – we learn this when we see a photo of the two of them together during Sophie’s prepubescence which Marybeth discovered in the presence of her dad, who promptly grabbed the photo and threw it away (and Marybeth, Josh and Ron stage a late-night raid and have to do some fancy and unintentionally funny evasive maneuvers to steal the bits of the photo while the elder Arredondo is there and stalking the unseen burglars with a gun) – and that was the leverage Toby had on her. He was able to blackmail Miss Mitchell into leaking the embarrassing photo of Marybeth by threatening to reveal that the adoption of Sophie wasn’t legal and potentially putting all of them in jeopardy. Marybeth has an after-school job working at a local bowling alley, staffing the shoe-rental concession, and the final climax takes place there. Marybeth has accepted Josh’s offer of a date after her shift ends, but when she accidentally spills soda on his crotch and he leaves to clean up, she gets an “extracredit” text message a week after the arrests of Miss Mitchell and Toby Dandrich seemingly stopped the “extracredit” threat. Thinking that Josh is “extracredit,” Marybeth calls Ron for help – only it turns out, courtesy of writer Leo McGuigan, that Ron is “extracredit” and his motive was the classic stalker’s fixation on Marybeth. Ron was convinced that the two of them were meant to be together, regardless of whatever else Marybeth would want to do with her life or whom she might want to do it with. Marybeth even gets a nice speech to the effect that she’s tired of other people telling her what she should do and who she should be, and from now on she’s going to make those decisions on her own: a nice self-empowering sentiment that deserved to be in a better movie. In fact, I had the same problem with Killing for Extra Credit that I did with Friday Night Sext Scandal: both movies seemed to be mediocre formula pieces with hints of much better things lurking around inside them. The whole business of a rich middle-aged man literally buying a baby as a fashion accessory and raising her as his own is pretty horrifying as it stands; instead McGuigan decided to create a spark of romantic interest between Señor Arredondo and Lydia Morris, where it seemed to me his only interest in her is, “Well, I can marry her and get myself a replacement daughter.”