Devil on Campus: The Larry Ray Story (Lifetime, 2024)

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

After The Bad Orphan Lifetime showed another really quirky movie with a standout performance in the title role: Devil on Campus: The Larry Ray Story. It’s based, at least more or less, on a true story: an ex-convict named Larry Ray (Billy Zane) gets released from prison and moves into Sarah Lawrence College with his daughter Talia and her roommates. Once there, he settles in and establishes himself as a man with an almost Svengali-like influence over his daughter and her friends. When a young man in Larry’s circle named Daniel Levin (Mike Merry) admits to Larry that he thinks he might be Gay, Larry responds by ordering Daniel to have sex with one of the girls in his entourage, Isabella, while Larry and everyone else in the commune watches. Larry exerts a power over his charges comparable to that of a religious cult leader, and according to a story about him in Vanity Fair magazine’s “The Cut” section from April 2019 (https://www.thecut.com/article/larry-ray-sarah-lawrence-students.html), the real-life Larry Ray was even more like a cult leader than the one depicted in this film, directed by Elisabeth Röhm (primarily known as an actress who did four years as an assistant D.A. on the original Law and Order from 2001 to 2005 and made her directorial debut there) and written by Waneta Storms. The real Larry Ray enrolled his charges in a cult-like pop-psychology program he called “Q4P” (which stood for “Quest for Potential”) and attempted to mind-control them by, among other things, repeatedly playing the song “Baba O’Riley” by The Who at top volume. The song isn’t in the movie, I’m guessing because Pete Townshend refused to license the rights. In any event, it’s an ironic song for the context because the lyrics are a satire of cults in general. It seems odd that Larry, who kept his people in a state of constant psychological dependence largely by having them continually beg him for “forgiveness” for various personal, psychological or financial slights, would embrace as part of his mind-control strategy a song with the line, “I don’t need to be forgiven.”

Like the real Larry Ray, the one in the movie pulls all the classic cult-leader strategies to keep his devotées in line. He isolates them geographically, moving them from the Sarah Lawrence dorms first to a New York apartment – where he keeps having run-ins with the landlord, who shows up at the most inopportune moments asking for back rent – and then to a farm in North Carolina where he says he needs them to do unpaid construction work so his supposedly evil mother can’t take the farm away from his stepfather. Larry also keeps his cult members isolated from their families, even when they get hospitalized for attempting suicide on his watch. In one chilling scene that actually happened, grieving parents are told they’re not allowed to see their son unless Larry is also present. Another strategy Larry pulls on his cult victims is debt peonage: he tells them that they’ve racked up six-figure debts to him for items they’ve allegedly stolen or destroyed, including a $300,000 back hoe his principal victim, Claudia Drury (Tedra Rogers), supposedly wrecked when she left a wheelbarrow in its path in North Carolina. (It didn’t look all that wrecked on screen.) The parents of one of Larry’s victims even had to sell their home to cover all the money their son was giving to Larry in the guise of “repayment,” and when they went to see Larry’s apartment so they could check for themselves the extent of the “damage” they were being told to pay for, Larry refused to let them in. Larry also makes his charges keep journals, and of course he reads them all to get even more information he can use to manipulate them. And like the real-life cult leader Werner Erhard of EST, Larry tells his people there’s no such thing as an “accident”: every time someone thinks they’ve “accidentally” done something, it’s really a sign of their own mental disturbance that caused them to lash out at an object and then claim it was an “accident.”

In one particularly nasty scene, Larry psychologically manipulates Claudia into a bizarre sequence of “confessions,” including trying to murder Larry and his daughter Talia by a long-term series of poisonings, while another cult member records it on her cell phone so Larry can threaten to give it to the police in case Claudia ever tries to report him. He also concocts a way of making money off Claudia; when she writes in her journal that she had a one-night sexual encounter with someone who wanted to dominate her and she unexpectedly enjoyed it, Larry tells Claudia she should work as a BDSM escort and turn over the money to him to pay her “debt” for the “wrecked” back hoe. This doesn’t work out quite the way Larry expected it to: one of her Johns, a man named “David,” insists on being the sub in their scenes together. He explains that he runs a company with over 135 employees and has to be in command at work, so when he plays he likes to be dominated for a change – a pattern I’ve also heard from real-life BDSM practitioners. Eventually he falls genuinely in love with Claudia and is ready to leave his wife and family for her – a danger not only to him and Claudia but to Larry as well. Larry tells Claudia to stop seeing David, but ultimately (at least in the movie) David shelters Claudia and that allows the FBI agents who are investigating Larry to catch up with her. Larry’s downfall occurs thanks to Vanity Fair reporters Ezra Marcus and James T. Walsh, who do a profile on him first published in April 2019 that alerts the FBI to his activities. Larry had also previously interfaced with the FBI when he claimed to have information about a pump-and-dump stock scandal involving a Mafia capo, and the FBI first enlisted him as an informant – they even paid over $10,000 to install security devices in his home – before they realized Larry was only posing as an informant to cover up his own involvement in the scheme.

When he was arrested and convicted – the film begins with his release from the prison sentence he received – he blamed then-New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and then-New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik and formed paranoid obsessions with both of them that are very much a part of this movie. (He was right about Giuliani and Kerik. Thanks to their associations with former President Donald Trump, Giuliani has lost his law licenses and been forced to declare bankruptcy, while Kerik was convicted of income-tax evasion and then pardoned by Trump in the last days of his first term.) Once again, what makes Devil on Campus worth watching is a first-rate lead performance by the actor playing the principal villain. I’ve had a curious relationship with Billy Zane ever since I saw the James Cameron Titanic in 1997; he was playing the asshole fiancé of the Kate Winslet character, but he also seemed so much sexier than Leonardo di Caprio that I had the feeling Winslet’s character was definitely trading down. In fact, the day after my husband Charles and I watched Titanic, I bought a used videotape of the 1996 film The Phantom mainly so I could see Billy Zane play a good guy! I’d pretty much lost contact with him after that, and not surprisingly Zane has got older and seedier since those credits of nearly three decades ago, but he’s fully in command of his role. Not only does he strikingly resemble the photos of the real Larry Ray as published in Vanity Fair, he strikes just the right combination of surface folksiness and underlying depravity (including his tortures of various members of his entourage that stop just short of murder) to make us believe in the character and the role.