There's a New Killer in Town (Reel One Entertainment, Champlain Media, CME Winter Productions, Lifetime, 2024)

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

The second Lifetime movie on September 29, There’s a New Killer in Town, was better than He Slid Into Her DM’s, but not by much. It’s set in an ultra-small town called Pine Point – we’re not told what state it’s in, but the town motto is “The True Escape” and the population is 15,201 – and the protagonist is Alice Clark (Kathryn Kohut). Alice is a trust-fund baby who doesn’t have to work, and she came to Pine Point to escape an abusive ex-husband, Kevin Corbett (Mark Matechuk). Her world turns upside down when another young woman, Ronnie Briggs (Hanneke Talbot), comes to town. Ronnie introduces herself as a travel writer who doesn’t stay in one place very long, and she says that she’s lost all her bank cards and doesn’t have any money for a place to stay. Alice runs into her at the Double-R Diner, which seems to be the only restaurant in town (or maybe it’s just that the filmmakers, CME Winter Productions, Champlain Pictures and Reel One Entertainment, couldn’t afford more than one restaurant set). The Double-R is run by a woman named Holly (Sarah Booth), who has also become a friend of Alice. Holly’s sister was murdered in a mysterious prologue scene, and Holly is keeping her memory alive. Alice’s bank cards mysteriously disappear from her purse, and we see a woman in a long-haired wig use them to withdraw $450 from Alice’s local bank account. Alice is also dating a local police officer, Oscar Ramirez (René Escobar, Jr., who for once is a hot-looking man in a Lifetime movie who isn’t playing a villain!), and she’s running a community garden which is her pride and joy.

She’s also mentoring a young Black girl named Maddie (Eden Cupid), whom she catches one night out drinking with an underage white teenager named Dylan (Keith Agar). Alice takes Dylan’s car keys away from him and tells him he can retrieve them from her or Oscar the next day. Maddie and Dylan respond by breaking into Alice’s precious garden and trashing it, spray-painting the walis in red with “BITCH” and other less savory words. Alice blames Ronnie for the vandalism, saying it was all because she asked Ronnie to leave her house after accusing Ronnie of stealing her bank cards and trying to drain her accounts. Then Alice is forced to apologize to Ronnie after Maddie confesses to the vandalism of the garden, and Alice and Holly get together at the garden to clean it up – though not too much because Alice still wants to leave Maddie something to do once she gets off school. Holly then confronts Ronnie and Alice on the floor of the Double-R and says she’s going to go to the police with her information, and it seems like even though Holly is white instead of Black, writer Charlie Mihelich seems to be setting her up for the role of The Heroine’s Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot But Is Killed Before She Can Warn Her. Alice’s creepy ex Kevin tries to break into her home by climbing a ladder outside her window, but is impaled with a gardening stake. The scene is carefully made to look like an accident, which is how Oscar Ramirez and his colleagues on the Pine Point police force rule it, but we know better, don’t we?

Then in the last 20 minutes or so, writer Mihelich and director Sean Cisterna (who, like Alicia Coppola on He Slid Into Her DM’s, is better than the script and cast deserve) pull a big reversal on us and reveal that [spoiler alert!] it’s actually Alice who’s the killer. She’s been making her living knocking off other women, stealing their identities and helping herself to their cash stashes and bank balances, passing herself off as a trust-fund baby to make it believable that she doesn’t have to work a normal job. Needless to say, Alice is also the one who knocked off Holly’s sister in the prologue. She catches Ronnie – who may or may not have been doing the same thing – and holds her hostage in Alice’s home, which she threatens to burn down by setting off a gas explosion. She’s already stabbed Holly at the Double-R and left her to die, and she intends to frame Ronnie for her crimes and incinerate her at the house – only Ronnie gets away in the nick of time just before the house blows up, and Alice is fleeing Pine Point when she hears on her car radio that Holly survived the assault after all, though she’s in the hospital. Alice turns around and drives back to Pine Point to finish Holly off once and for all, and the two struggle – Holly nearly strangles Alice with her IV line and Alice is alive but unconscious when Oscar and the rest of the police arrive. Alice is arrested, Oscar’s faced with the embarrassment of having dated a murderess, and Holly lives and reopens the Double-R. I wasn’t particularly surprised by this ending even though I wasn’t expecting it, either.

It doesn’t work for the same reasons director Fritz Lang protested when he was forced by his producer, Bert Friedlob, to use a similar twist ending for his last American film, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. The gimmick in that one is that Dana Andrews plays a crusading reporter who wants to make a point against capital punishment by showing how easily a man can be convicted and sentenced to death based on circumstantial evidence – only the twist in that one is that Andrews’s character has someone he really wants to murder and his story is an elaborate hoax to cover up his actual crime. As Lang told Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for their 1969 book The Celluloid Muse, “I cannot, I said, make an audience love Dana Andrews for one hour and 38 minutes and then in the last two minutes reveal that he’s really a son-of-a-bitch and that the whole thing is just a joke. But thanks to my agent’s mistake I was contractually bound to shoot the producer’s original script.” And if Fritz Lang couldn’t do it with Dana Andrews, certainly Sean Cisterna couldn’t with Kathryn Kohut, especially since Kohut was a good enough actress to play the “good” side of her character convincingly but was totally unable to drop the hints of psychopathology needed to make the ending believable. In fairness to Kohut, writer Mihelich didn’t give her any help, either; he didn’t supply any scenes that might have raised our suspicions about Alice before his trick reversal. There’s a New Killer in Town – a title that had me thinking of The Eagles’ song “New Kid in Town” – is an O.K. Lifetime movie with a frankly unbelievable trick ending that, at least to me (I think my husband Charles liked it better than I did), weakened the film and made it less entertaining than it would have been with a straightforward climax of Alice fighting for her life against Ronnie.