The Ice Rink Murders (CMW Motion Pictures, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Saturday, May 25) I watched two Lifetime movies, one of which I had high hopes for that proved to be a disappointment, while the other was better than I’d expected despite misleading promos that made it seem quite different from what it was. The one that disappointed me aired at 4 p.m. (afternoon instead of evening) and was called The Ice Rink Murders. It’s a story about skullduggery in the world of competitive figure skating, directed by Wendy Ord from a script by Maddison Bullock (a woman, by the way) based on a story she co-wrote with Kelli Kaye and Tom Shell. The imdb.com page for The Ice Rink Murders only lists four actors with their character names, and there are some quite strikingly etched roles in the dramatis personae whom I would dearly love to be able to identify with the people who played them, but I wasn’t able to find any online source that had that information. The central character is Megan Ryder (played by Maddison Bullock herself), a young and upcoming figure skater who took a year or so off because her mother got cancer and is just now in remission after a round of chemo. She’s trying to get back and has a highly prized scholarship offer from the Mission Gym (“Mission” is the name of the town in Washington state where this takes place but it’s also appropriate given the monastic level of discipline imposed by the coach who runs it) to study under their fearsome trainer, Dianne Taylor, who runs the place like a concentration-camp commandant and, among other things, forbids her charges from dating or having any romantic or sexual relationships that might interfere with their training. This poses a particular problem for Megan since she’s being cruised by at least two young men in the program, aspiring hockey player Trevor Johnson (Spencer Borgeson) and aspiring something-or-other Max.

Megan crosses swords with Trevor’s sister Carly (Natasha Calis) almost immediately when Megan does a workout at a ballet-style barre and Carly insists, “That’s my spot.” We’ve already seen a prologue in which a male skater named Brian was assaulted by a hooded figure with a hockey stick and knocked over into the path of a Zamboni (the machine that drives over the ice on a rink to repave it after the skaters have chewed it up). The whirling blades of the Zamboni slice and dice him and splatter his blood over the rink – of course I inevitably joked, “Ah, the Zamboni of Doom!” I remember doing a bit of a double-take when the film opened with a male skater since the promos for it had made it seem like it was about women skaters exclusively, but eventually we learn that Brian was Carly’s ice-dancing partner but was receiving congratulatory notes from a girl named Lyndsey (Brittany Clough). There’s also an eccentric older man named “Blades” who works at the rink and whose job, not surprisingly, is to sharpen the skaters’ skates. Brian’s remains are discovered in Blades’s workspace and he’s arrested for Brian’s murder. Lyndsey is attacked by a saboteur who puts glass in her ballet slipper (a gimmick Lifetime used much more effectively in a previous movie about the rivalry between aspiring ballerinas), which doesn’t kill her but puts her out of action for the all-important training period for the national championships.

While I was watching this film I was rooting around online for information about the names of the production companies and the cast list (one site listed Alana Hawley Purvis, Dalia Blake, Ali Karr, Harrison Coe and Amy Trefrey as being in the movie but did not specify their roles) and came across a Web site called “Villainous Beauties Wiki” which gave away the ending of the movie – not that that was that big a surprise: the villainous beauty is [spoiler alert!] Carly Johnson, who was the masked hockey-stick-wielding assailant who offed Brian in the opening scene and then framed Blades for her and also assaulted her own brother, thereby making it too risky for him to continue playing hockey so he shifted to ice dancing with his sister Carly as his partner, and strangled Coach Taylor to death. Carly’s motives were 1) she had previously been Coach Taylor’s teacher’s pet until Megan showed up and aced her out of that spot, and 2) Brian had been her partner until he decided to bolt from their act and pair up with Lyndsey instead. There’s a predictable suspense finish with Carly stalking Megan through an underground boiler room or something before Megan finally overpowers her and Carly is arrested.

One problem with The Ice Rink Murders is that Lifetime either couldn’t or wouldn’t hire figure-skating doubles for the main cast members, so we don’t see any skaters do the spectacular jumps that are the essence of the sport these days. At least the actors do the sorts of tight spins that are what figure skating used to be all about – the reason the sport is called “figure skating” is that it used to be about tracing figures on the ice surface, and the judges would come out with calipers to measure how precisely the skaters had traced the figures. (This is the sort of figure skating that won Sonja Henie Olympic gold three times in a row – in 1928, 1932 and 1936 – and was probably good training for her when she started making movies and had to do precise choreographies that would put her front and center to the cameras and enable her to hit invisible “marks.”) There’s also a weird scene in which Coach Taylor puts Megan into a harness and pulls her up with a rope; the idea is to prepare her to learn the big jumps, but it comes off more like an S/M sex scene than any sort of athletic training. The biggest disappointment with The Ice Rink Murders is that the murders themselves kept getting in the way of what would otherwise have been a compelling story about a group of fiercely competitive people locked into an hermetically sealed world with their entire futures at stake – though at least I give Maddison Bullock credit for creating a showcase role for herself as both writer and star!