Deadly DILF (Penalty Vox, Tubi Movies, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night (Sunday, August 25) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie from 2023 (apparently originally made for premium cable, either for the Lifetime Movie Network or the Tubi streaming service, since there were a lot of swear words obviously “bleeped”) called Deadly DILF. “DILF” is an expression I’d never heard before (though Charles had); it’s a term used to describe an older but still sexually attractive man, and according to Wikipedia it’s an acronym for “Dad I’d Like to Fuck.” (There’s also an analogous term for older but still sexually attractive women, “MILF.”) Actually the title is a misnomer because the “deadly” character is not the DILF himself, Rio Logan (Curtis Hamilton), but the young woman who seduces him, Elysium Tofte (Sofia Bryant). Elysium – who explains her unusual first name by saying she was born in Greece and named after the Greek word for “heaven” – has just moved into Rio’s neighborhood with her aunt Kendra (Jeryl Prescott Gallien) and is an undergraduate at the local university. So is Rio; even though he’s 35 he’s still going to school because his college career got interrupted when his mom got cancer and he had to drop out to take care of her. He’s currently married to Tori (Naomi Walley), though he had a previous wife named Mera (Yolanthe Cabau) – pronounced “Mira” – by whom he had a son, Gunnar (Tharen Jerome Todd, Jr.). Tori and Rio are starting a gym business together, though it’s clear she’s the breadwinner in the family. Tori also started dating Rio while he was still married to Mera, which becomes a major point in their arguments later. Tori leaves town on a business trip and Elysium targets Rio, eventually seducing him despite his initial protestations that he’s a married man.

Then, in the manner of so many Lifetime villainesses before her, she decides he’s The Man for her and literally won’t let him alone. Elysium talks herself into a job at Rio’s and Tori’s gym and also transfers so she can be in all Rio’s classes. When she sees Rio in the school library studying with a blonde white girl, Farrah (Daniela Lee), whom he also might be flirting with (director Dylan Vox and writers Eliza Hayes Maher and Scotty Mullen keep it ambiguous), Elysium has a jealous hissy-fit. She responds by vandalizing Rio’s car, first scratching it with her athletic cleats (she’s going to college in the first place on a high-jump scholarship) and then breaking its windows and slashing at least one of its tires. Rio tries to get Elysium kicked off the school’s athletic team by spiking her water bottle with an illegal substance, which turns up on Elysium’s drug test and Coach Mills (Jana Lee Hamblin) throws her off the team. Elysium is determined to get back, which she does by hiding a gun in Gunnar’s bedroom – the gun is Rio’s and in a previous scene we’ve seen her break into the locked box that contains it, an interesting variation on the Chekhov’s pistol principle – and then reporting Rio to the authorities as an unfit parent. Elysium also rigs up a booby trap on Rio’s locker, but the trap kills not Rio but his voice-of-reason brother Jake (Zach Sowers), whom Elysium also tried to seduce but blew it when she called Jake “Rio” in bed. Ultimately Rio takes the gun and threatens to kill Elysium for having ruined his life, but in the meantime her aunt Kendra (ya remember Elysium’s aunt Kendra?) gets in her car and accidentally runs over and kills Rio’s wife Tori (ya remember Rio’s wife Tori?).

The film has one of those bleakly pessimistic endings Lifetime’s writers are all too fond of these days: Rio is in the exercise yard of the local jail, he gets a letter but we only hear the salutation in the voiceover (we never learn who the letter is from or the rest of its contents), and the final scene shows Elysium in a mausoleum leaving flowers and a crust-free jelly sandwich for her dead father (which is the only way we find out Elysium’s last name). Earlier the film had kicked off with a prologue, set six months before the main action, which showed Elysium being chased by an older Black man with a gun, only he’s the one who ends up dead; there are various allusions to this later on but it’s not clear whether the older Black man in this scene is a previous DILF or Elysium’s actual father. There are also two other characters, both people Elysium’s own age: a white guy named Dameon (Michael Deni) who drives by in a fancy red convertible and yells out blatantly sexual taunts at her which she couldn’t be less interested in; and an Asian guy named Chris (Jonathan Tanigaki). We first meet Chris when he and Elysium are peering over the fence separating her back yard from Rio’s and catching look-sees at Rio’s topless – and eventually, presumably naked, though we don’t get that much of a glimpse ourselves – bod as he’s attempting to install an outdoor shower. We get the distinct impression that Chris is Gay and he’s just as interested in Rio’s body as Elysium is. Deadly DILF is a pretty hopeless movie, even by Lifetime standards; director Dylan Vox (who also co-produced this through a company of his own with the inventive name “Penalty Vox”) shows a flair for indirection with his shots of Rio and Elysium touching fingers over her water bottle to show their mutual sexual attraction, but his soft-core porn scene when the two of them finally make it to the bedroom is disappointing and there was a much better one involving two Black protagonists in the recent Lifetime movie Tempted by Love, directed by Talilah Breon from a script by Tamara Gregory based on Terry McMillan’s novel.