Trapped by My Sugar Daddy, a.k.a. Prisoner of Love (Almost Never Films, RNR Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Much the same could be said of Trapped by My Sugar Daddy, which was originally filmed in 2022 as Prisoner of Love. Like Killer Fortune Teller, Trapped by My Sugar Daddy begins with a mysterious prologue set 20 years before the main story and its connection to the main plot remains defiantly obscure. A young woman is flying on a private plane with a man she thinks is her sugar-daddy boyfriend, but he turns out to be Peter Coleman (Ryan Francis), who overpowers her on the plane, puts a hood over her head, and … Then we cut to the main action, set in Greenwich, Connecticut (Killer Fortune Teller was definitely set in Los Angeles), in which mother Sarah Bragg (Tiffany Montgomery) and her 18-year-old daughter Carly (Katie Kelly, top-billed) are budding interior designers. When the house across the street from theirs is bought by a wealthy 50-something named Kyle Smithford (James Hyde), the Braggs offer themselves for the job as their decorator, insulting rival designer Amanda James (played by Lindsay Hartley, who also directed from a script by Dave Hickey and Casey Bose). Naturally, Kyle has the hots for Carly and vice versa, even though (as she keeps being reminded by her mom and the other characters) he’s old enough to be her father. Incidentally, Carly’s real father, Michael Bragg, is in the dramatis personae and he’s being played by Michael Wagemann, whom I thought was the sexiest actor in the film. It is clear that the three Braggs live together – Michael is not a divorced dad who’s sort-of in her daughter’s life – though it’s not clear what, if anything, Michael does for a living. Carly is attending design school in New York, and her best friend there is a young Black woman named Melanie Bradley (Heather Lynn Harris), nicknamed “Mel.”

At first I thought Hickey and Bose were setting Mel up to be The Heroine’s Black Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot but Is Killed Before She Can Warn Her, but Mel has her own bad boyfriend. He calls himself “Brent Cundey” (Ryan Francis) but he’s really “Peter Coleman” (though neither of those names are his real one), the man whom we saw in the prologue doing whatever was done to that young woman two decades earlier. Midway through the movie a mystery woman crashes Kyle’s home while he and Carly are there making out; she holds a gun on him and threatens to kill him over the mysterious disappearance of her daughter years before. Ultimately we realize that this is the mother of the young woman in the prologue to whom Peter, Brent or whatever his name is did whatever to her; we’ve assumed all along he killed her and dumped her body out of the plane in mid-flight. It turns out that Kyle and “Brent” are high-end human traffickers who specialize in seducing naïve teenage girls who are disaffected with their parents; they romance them for a while and then pack them off in a private plane to their ultimate destinations with rich creeps around the world who want them as permanent sex slaves (or at least until the rich clients tire of them and kill them, which they can do because they’re part of the world’s 0.001 percent and therefore have actual, if not legal, immunity from any criminal or civil prosecution whatsoever). Ultimately Sarah and Michael cotton to what’s going on, and there’s a neat climax in which both grown Braggs rescue Carly and Mel from the clutches of the evil traffickers, including crashing their car into the open gate of Kyle’s plane, thereby disabling it long enough for the police to arrive and arrest Kyle and “Brent.” (Fortunately, this is one Lifetime movie that ends with the villains being arrested instead of dying in a bloodbath.)

There’s a neat tag scene in which Carly is shown deciding to change her college major from interior design to psychiatry because she wants to help other naïve young women avoid being ensnared by older well-to-do scumbags like she was. There are also some other characters, including Carly’s age-peer boyfriend Ben (Hunter Hobbs), who’s appropriately homely and makes it credible that Carly would think she was trading up for an older man who, besides his fortune, looked considerably sexier; and Bob (Ben Richardson), owner of a New York City bar for which Carly and Mel work – apparently there’s a quirk in New York’s liquor laws in which you have to be 21 to drink legally but you can work in a bar at 18. Bob gives Carly a job as a server but it’s obvious (at least to us) that he’s really trying to get into her pants; Carly holds down the job until $600 in cash mysteriously goes missing from his safe. He’s convinced Carly stole it and fires Mel, too, when Mel tries to defend her – of course the real culprits are Ben and two heavy-set thugs who work for him, who stole the money and then framed Carly for the crime. I wish they’d kept the original, more ambiguous title Prisoner of Love for this one, and I kept flashing back to a much better 1949 movie on this same theme, Caught, directed by Max Ophuls and an uncredited John Berry and featuring Barbara Bel Geddes as a naïve young woman who dreams of marrying a rich man; Robert Ryan as the rich man she marries but then finds him pathologically jealous and possessive; and James Mason as the nice young doctor she goes to work for (and falls in love with) once she’s walked out on her husband’s money and stifling environment. I was surprised when I looked up my moviemagg review on Caught and found it oddly lukewarm (it’s on https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2011/03/caught-enterprise-mgm-1949.html), but it’s still a damned sight better than Trapped by My Sugar Daddy a.k.a. Prisoner of Love!