Couples Retreat Murder (Hybrid, Lifetime, 2024)

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

The next Lifetime movie, Couples Retreat Murder, was so annoying and stupid it made Amish Affair look like a masterpiece by comparison. Rebecca “Becky” Curtis (Jessica Morris) and her husband, attorney Jim Curtis (Rib Hillis, who’s got one of the greatest pair of man-tits I’ve ever seen even though, alas, we don’t get the topless shots of him I was hoping for!), have a stale marriage. Becky goes out for a night on the town with her old college friend Paulina (Natalie Daniels), who’s married to Phil (Corin Nemec), a spoiled rich kid Becky briefly dated in college before she met Jim. Paulina suggests that the Curtises join her and Phil on a “couples’ retreat” vacation at a desert resort called “Lotusland.” (I presume the name was writer Adam Rockoff’s idea of irony.) Lotusland is run by a phony therapist named Alan Brant (Alex Trumble), and among his demands of his guests are no alcohol, a strict vegetarian diet, no cell phones – he confiscates them as they sign in – and a strict regimen of group “therapy” sessions that seems far more like a drill camp than anything truly therapeutic. Among his other assignments for the hapless guests is sending Jim, Becky, Phil and Paulina on a nature hike through the unspoiled desert to an unspecified location where they will supposedly “get it.” When the stay starts there are at least two other couples there, Joel and Jenny Rollins (Adam Russ and Kianna Vo) and Steve and Erica Persky (Eddie Blackwell Williams and April Hale). But when they get back from the nature hike the other couples are gone and so is Phil. The two remaining couples find the dead body of Alan Brant on the premises and determine to leave the place, only they find that their cars’ tires have been slashed and the cars have been drained of brake fluid.

Earlier in the piece Jim’s wallet had mysteriously disappeared from his night table, then just as mysteriously reappeared, and we’d seen a few shots of a shadowy figure dressed in boots with elevated heels skulking around the facility and, in one shot, cutting the telephone lines to render the resort’s one landline – its only working phone once Brant confiscated all the residents’ cell phones – inoperative. Through most of Couples Retreat Murder I was irritated by a common fault of modern-day movies: no one in the dramatis personae we actually like. Then we get a shot of Jim Curtis and Paulina necking, and we realize [spoiler alert!] that the two of them were having an affair and concocted this whole elaborate plot to get rid of their current and suddenly inconvenient spouses. In the big final confrontation, when Becky asks Jim why, if he wanted to be rid of her, he didn’t just divorce her instead of joining Paulina’s plot to kill her and Phil, Jim says it was because of the life-insurance policies he and Paulina both had on their current spouses. Doubtless the fortune Paulina stood to inherit from Phil once he was out of the way was a factor, too. And Brant also ended up dead in Jim’s and Paulina’s plot because he’d been accused of fraud in a previous case and, after Jim got him acquitted, Brant stiffed him on his fee. Ultimately the state police – alerted in a previous scene in which Becky realized that, even if the cars themselves had been rendered non-functional, their electrical systems still worked and could be used to access the Internet – arrive and take both Jim and Paulina into custody. (The moment I saw those great man-tits and their nipples poking through Rib Hillis’s tight T-shirts, I just knew he was going to turn out to be a bad guy!) About the only good things about Couples Retreat Murder are the stunning shots of desert scenery director Amy Barrett (not the one who’s currently on the U.S. Supreme Court!) and cinematographer Lars Lindstrom got into it, and those thoroughly deserved a better movie!