Killer Fortune Teller (Hybrid, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Sunday, April 14) I gave my husband Charles a choice as to what TV shows we’d watch next: the much-hyped Billy Joel concert special on CBS (featuring his 100th and final show at Madison Square Garden) or two Lifetime movies. Charles surprised me with his choice: he said, “If it was Billy Joel from 30 years ago I’d be interested, but not with his voice as it is now.” (He also said that Billy Joel had been a favorite of his mother’s when he was growing up.) So we watched the two Lifetime movies, Killer Fortune Teller and Trapped by My Sugar Daddy a.k.a. Prisoner of Love. Killer Fortune Teller turned out to be an O.K. melodrama about a brother and sister, Shane (Jonathan Stoddard) and Olivia (Sarah Murphree) Settel, who inherited the multinational Settel Pharmaceuticals company on the death of their father a few months before. It opens with one of those maddening prologues Lifetime and its producers are very big on these days, in which a woman we don’t know is wheeled into a hospital emergency room and, despite their best efforts (including intubating her – i.e., putting her on a ventilator – which happened to me during my health crisis in December 2021), she dies. Then the film flashes forward 20 years and initially focuses on the rivalry between the Settel siblings, and in particular Olivia’s resentment that the company’s board gave Shane the CEO title even though Olivia got better grades in business school and was all-around more qualified, simply because Shane had a dick. Shane is negotiating a big merger deal with a rival drug company whose founding CEO is still very much alive, in charge and determined not to sell.

Because his dad was big into mysticism in general and fortune-tellers and Tarot card readers in particular, Shane decides to check out well-known “intuitive” Arabella Prescott (Avis Wrentmore) – imdb.com lists her first name as “Arabelle” but I’m quite sure what I heard the actors say was “Arabella” – at her roadside Tarot stand. Arabella is not in when Shane arrives, but he’s read by her staff member, Maya Priestley (Natalie Daniels), who handles the Tarot cards herself. (I’ve heard from actual Tarot readers that the person being read is supposed to handle the cards, but Charles said he’s heard of it both ways.) With Maya’s encouragement, Shane pushes through his big deal and, at a dull business party to celebrate it, he “accidentally” runs into Natalie King (Caina Summer Field) when he bumps into her (or she into him) and his drink spills all over her. The two start dating – Natalie introduces herself as a “journalist” even though she’s only a blogger specializing in stories about real estate (she covers something called “Proposition 28,” and while we never quite learn what that is it seems to have something to do with expanding opportunities for affordable housing). Shane tells Natalie he ultimately wants eight children, and Natalie says, “Then we’d better get started on that right away” – though, alas, writer/director Peter Sullivan and his writing colleagues, Jeffrey Schenck and Adam Rockoff (the Usual Suspects in the Johnson Production Group’s films), don’t give us the hot soft-core porn scene between them Danny J. Boyle and Ashley O’Neil did in Secret Life of the Pastor’s Wife.

As the film progresses (like a disease), it becomes more and more apparent to us, if not to the Settels, that Maya Priestley and Natalie King are working together in some sort of criminal scheme, including spiking a drink with poison to dispatch Shane’s assistant Tyler Armstrong (Kenny Resch, who looked so much like Jonathan Stoddard I began to wonder if he was a third Settel sibling) which the police later rule was an “accidental” drug overdose. Olivia is suspicious enough of Natalie King that she grabs a wine glass with her fingerprints on it and gives it to her friend, African-American police detective Rita Halsey (Jessica A. Caesar), to run her prints. Rita tells Olivia that “Natalie King”’s real name is Janice Augustine, and when Olivia passes the information on to Shane he recognizes the last name as that of a family who sued Settel Pharmaceuticals for wrongful death in connection with a woman who died of cancer while on the company’s supposed “miracle drug,” Tranquilify (though sometimes the name is spelled “Traquilify,” without the “n”). Later on we learn that “Maya Priestley” is really Lizzie Augustine, Janice’s sister, and the two women hatched this plot in which one would pose as a Tarot card reader (we eventually learn from Arabella Prescott herself that Maya had been with her only a few months and had not got her licensing credentials from the national Tarot card readers’ association, which made me wonder if there really is such a thing and, if there is, what test do they give aspiring Tarot card readers to prove themselves worthy of a license the way aspiring cosmetologists have to prove themselves by doing haircuts) while the other seduced Shane, got him to marry her, then the two would kill both Shane and Olivia and inherit the Settel Pharmaceuticals fortune. Of course it all works out in the end, and Shane gallantly agrees to resign the CEO position in favor of his more highly qualified sister. Killer Fortune Teller was an O.K. Lifetime movie, not as wildly outrageous or as melodramatic as some I’ve seen but not as genuinely moving as a handful of the others I’ve seen either.