The Stepdaughter (Footage Films Studios, Tubi, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, August 31) Lifetime showed a two-part, four-hour TV-movie, The Stepdaughter and The Stepdaughter 2, that was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen on the network. It was one of their “race” movies, in which all the principal characters were Black, and it’s about Joanna Lawrence, true name Maggie Dillon (Cassidey Fralin), who shows up one afternoon unannounced at the home of her biological father Michael (Blue Kimble) and his new wife, Whitney Hughs (Annie Ngosi Ilonzeh). The imdb.com cast list spells Whitney’s last name as the more normal “Hughes,” but “Hughs” is what we see on an online news story announcing their wedding. Whitney brought to the marriage her two sons by an earlier marriage that ended with the death of her husband, Brian, also known as “B.K.” (have it your way!) and Eric. The brothers are played by real-life brothers Akeem (Brian) and Jered (Eric) Cheatham – well, that’s one way to make sure your characters look biologically related: cast real biological relatives. It’s not clear what Michael does for a living, but Whitney has built a moderately successful cosmetics company catering to Black women and is ready to take it to the next level. She’s arranged for a meeting with executives from Walmart to see if they’ll carry her products in their stores, but Joanna sabotages the meeting by spiking Whitney’s cosmetics with lye, which literally burns the skin off of the faces of the two women Whitney had hired as models. She does a lot of other nasty things to the Lawrences as well as attempting to seduce both of Hughs’s sons (since they’re not biologically related and therefore it wouldn’t be incest in the literal sense) as well as their best friend, Dante Owens (Aaron Bryce Sheets). When Dante grabs Joanna’s private diary in a little black book (really!) and starts reading it, Joanna goes ballistic and beats him to death – though she somehow manages to conceal the crime even though it left blood all over the sheets. She’s somehow able to sneak the body out of the house and dump it off a bridge, though we don’t find this out until several acts later and in the meantime none of the other characters seem perturbed about Dante’s sudden disappearance.

Joanna also accepts Whitney’s invitation for a girls-only afternoon together during which they’ll go to a beauty parlor, but Whitney collapses during the outing under the influence of some powerful drugs with which someone has spiked her normal prescription medications. Through most of the film, co-written, co-produced and directed by Christopher B. Stokes, we’re unclear whether Joanna is just a teenage psychopath or something else is driving her. We do learn she had a singularly unhappy childhood, losing her mother when she was 10 and losing her grandmother more recently – it was grandma’s death in Louisiana that propelled her to cross the country and turn up in Orange County, California to seek out her dad – so for a while we’re not sure whether we’re supposed to hate her or feel sorry for her and the awful background she endured that has made her a monster. It’s only in the last act that we learn [spoiler alert!] that Michael, her father, is in on her game; the two of them are con artists. Michael seeks out well-to-do Black women he can marry so he can grab their fortunes and then kill them, sort of like Henri Verdoux in Charlie Chaplin’s pioneering black comedy Monsieur Verdoux (1947), and collect their inheritances and/or get life insurance payouts on them. Only [double spoiler alert!] Joanna, whose real name is Maggie Dillon, learns that Michael actually killed her mother by spiking her meds with the same “cocktail” of cocaine and two other dangerous drugs Joanna later used on Whitney, so she turns against him and they’re about ready to kill each other when Whitney grabs a gun one of them has left on the floor during their big confrontation and shoots Michael in the back. Episode one ends with both Michael and Joanna in police custody, and Whitney’s sister Cassandra (Judi Johnson) and police officer brother-in-law Terrance Clark (Rayan Lawrence) – the only two sympathetic people in the entire story – take custody of Brian and Eric after Whitney is adjudged an unfit mother because cocaine and other drugs were found in Whitney’s system after she allegedly tried to kill herself. Of course, it was all Joanna’s fault – she gave Whitney the incapacitating drugs and slashed her wrists to make it look like she’d tried to kill herself, and she also gave tranquilizing injections to both Cassandra and Terrance so they wouldn’t interfere with her plans to kill both Michael and Whitney to grab the Hughs inheritance for herself.

The Stepdaughter 2 (Footage Films Studios, Tubi, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Stepdaughter 2, which Lifetime showed at 8 p.m. Sunday, August 31 right after rerunning the original The Stepdaughter from its own “premiere” showing the night before (though both these movies had originally aired on the Tubi “streaming” service in 2024 and Tubi got a co-production credit along with the awkwardly named Footage Films Studios and Lifetime), established that Michael Lawrence had somehow escaped from prison and landed a job running a restaurant inside a hotel in San Diego. He’s latched onto a new pigeon, Tessa Daniel (Erica Pinkett), who owns a company called Stretch that makes spandex clothes. She’s a multibillionaire, thanks to the fortune she inherited from her late husband as well as the fortune she’s made on her own from her clothing company. As the film begins Michael, who’s using the name “Christopher Michaels,” is putting on his big seduction act and eventually she induces Tessa to marry him. Only no sooner has that happened that Michael’s psycho daughter Joanna once again turns up at their home and is up to her old tricks again. We learn that Joanna was in a coma for a month, but when she came to she murdered the doctor who’d been treating her and escaped custody by impersonating her. She insists that Michael join him in a scheme to kill Tessa for her money and make it look like an accident – until then it’s been unclear whether Michael genuinely loved Tessa and saw her as an opportunity to get off the murder treadmill and live the rest of his life decently and honestly or whether he intended her as a target from the get-go. It’s unclear whether Christopher B. Stokes, who directed, co-wrote, and co-produced The Stepdaughter and The Stepdaughter 2, ever made up his mind on that point either. Michael takes Joanna aside in his guise as “Christopher” and tells her that he’ll join in her plot to take down Tessa and grab her fortune on condition that she not try to seduce Tessa’s son Trevor (Keyon Bowman), who aside from his weaknesses in math is an honors student in high school with firm admission and scholarship offers from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Princeton. Trevor is supposedly Tessa’s son by her late husband Hank, but midway through we learn that his actual biological father is Tessa’s ex Brandon.

The imdb.com page on The Stepdaughter 2 is confusing because it credits a white actor, Ken Lawson, as Brandon, but the character we see on screen is definitely Black; indeed, whoever’s playing Brandon looks so much like Blue Kimble, who’s playing Michael, that during their fight scenes it’s hard to tell which one is which. What’s more, during all this Tessa, despite being 50 years old, has got pregnant by Michael, and she wants to keep this a secret until she has a chance to tell him. Of course Joanne learns it through guile – she finds Tessa’s positive pregnancy test in her trash – and spreads the news far and wide, surprising Tessa’s girlfriends who had assumed she was past child-bearing age. Michael is overjoyed by the news that he’s going to be a father again, but Joanne cruelly reminds him that Tessa’s new baby is just one more potential heir standing between them and the Daniel fortune and therefore the only way they can inherit Tessa’s money is to kill Tessa before her baby is born. They also need to kill Trevor while they’re at it. While all this is going on we have periodic flashbacks to the characters from the first The Stepdaughter. We re-meet Whitney Hughs at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, telling the group that the stresses from the first film’s events led her first to prescription drugs and then to wine, then to hard liquor, until she hit the proverbial bottom and started to recover. We also meet two new police officer characters, Detective Hines (Mike Hill) and Detective Irving (Apryl Jones). Detective Hines is still determined to recapture Michael and Joanne Lawrence despite Detective Irving’s puzzlement that he’s so desperate to reopen this particular cold case. It turns out that Detective Hines actually dated Whitney Hughs before she married Michael Lawrence, and he’s determined not only to give her justice but to catch Michael and Joanne so he can win back Whitney’s love. Detective Hines even goes to see Whitney and offers her police protection, including an unmarked car stationed outside her door, in the unlikely event Michael ever comes to see her again. The Stepdaughter 2 has a particularly frustrating open ending in which Michael and Joanne are once again arrested, only we’re told that they’ve escaped and in the chilling final scene, Michael once again shows up at Whitney’s home and we’re left with the sinking feeling that somehow Christopher B. Stokes is setting us up for The Stepdaughter 3. (That prospect reminded me of the Los Angeles Times reviewer who wrote about the film Saw 4 and pleaded, “Don’t see this movie. Don’t give them an excuse to make Saw 5.” As things turned out, they made not only a Saw 5 but a Saw 6 before the series blessedly sawed itself out of its – and our – misery.)

The Kid Brother (Harold Lloyd Productions, Paramount, 1927)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the horrors of the Lifetime movies The Stepdaughter and The Stepdaughter 2 on Sunday, August 31, my husband Charles and I got to watch a truly great film: a Blu-Ray transfer of Harold Lloyd’s 1927 film The Kid Brother. It was reportedly Lloyd’s favorite of his own films and one of the few he would allow to be shown publicly during the last two decades of his life (his dates were 1893-1971). It was also a commercial disappointment because it was so dark. Lloyd’s stock in trade was playing the brash middle-class striver in happy-go-lucky comedies, often with spectacular thrill sequences. Lloyd himself once commented, “I made just six thrill pictures, and those are the only ones anyone remembers!” The Kid Brother is a pastoral comedy in which Lloyd plays Harold Hickory, growing up in the town of Hickoryville under the long shadows of his father, Sheriff Jim Hickory (Walter James) and his brothers Leo (Leo Willis) and Olin (Olin Francis). Harold is relentlessly bullied by his dad, his brothers, neighbors Sam Hooper (Frank Lanning) and his son Hank (Ralph Yearsley), and just about everybody else in town. Hickoryville is invaded by “Prof. Powers’s Medicine Show,” which since the recent death of Prof. Powers has been run by his daughter Mary (Jobyna Ralston, who took over from Mildred Davis as Lloyd’s leading lady when Mildred quit to marry Lloyd for real; they stayed together until her death in 1969, and of the leading male comedians of the silent era – Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon – Lloyd was the only one who married just once) and two shady associates, “Flash” Farrell (Eddie Boland), who’s taken over from the late Prof. Powers the job of hawking the patent medicine the show sells (which he says is good not only for whatever ails you but also for polishing furniture and keeping horses’ harnesses supple), and strongman Sandoni (Constantine Romanoff).

While he’s wearing his dad’s sheriff’s badge, Harold is tricked by the medicine-show people into signing a permit for them to operate in Hickoryville, and when dad finds out he sends Harold to shut down the show. Of course, Harold has no chance of doing that against the throngs of people who’ve been attracted to it. He tries to sneak his way to the front of the crowd where “Flash” is hawking the magic elixir, and eventually he ends up trapped on stage and literally handcuffed to a swinging trapeze bar. That isn’t enough for “Flash,” who lights a bed warmer and waves it under Harold’s ass, only he loses control of it and sets the entire medicine show on fire. Mary frees Harold from the handcuffs (she happens to have the key) and Harold takes her into the Hickorys’ home – but a local busybody couple takes Mary out of the Hickorys’ place and into their own because they don’t think it’s proper for a woman to spend the night with a whole house full of unmarried men. (We don’t see a Mrs. Hickory, so we’re obviously supposed to assume Jim is a widower.) To escape his brothers, who are after him at least to beat him up and possibly to kill him, Harold fakes it to look like he’s gone out to sleep in the barn while he actually sleeps on the couch in the space he made up for Mary. Brothers Leo and Olin both think Mary is the person sleeping on the couch and compete to bring “her” breakfasts and flowers. While all this has been going on, the good citizens of Hickoryville have been collecting money to build a dam for the town and have entrusted the cash to Sheriff Jim, who will hold it until a representative of the state treasurer comes to collect it the next day. (There’s a glitch in that the letter from the Hickorys announcing that they’ve collected the money for the dam is dated May 5, but the calendar on the wall is set to August.)

Unbeknownst to anyone but Harold – and even he is unsure as to what’s really going on – “Flash” and Sandoni are skulking around the Hickorys’ home intending to steal the dam money, which they do. This sets up the film’s most audacious sequence: while the rest of the townspeople have been convinced by Sam Hooper that Sheriff Jim has stolen the dam money and are literally preparing to lynch him over it, Harold sees a leaflet for the medicine show and deduces that “Flash” and Sandoni stole the money and are hiding inside the Black Ghost, an old, derelict sailing ship beached on the town’s nearby lake. Harold rows out to the wreck of the Black Ghost and there ensues a series of scenes that when I first saw this movie with Charles in the 1990’s (as one of a series of Harold Lloyd films I’d recorded onto VHS from Turner Classic Movies showings) reminded me so much of F. W. Murnau’s vampire classic Nosferatu (1922) I was convinced Lloyd had seen it and was deliberately parodying it. Not only does the cadaverous appearance of Constantine Romanoff as Sandoni remind me of Max Schreck, the star of Nosferatu, there are plenty of sequences “copped” from Murnau’s film, including shots of faces of people (or, in some scenes, a pet monkey) leering over open hatches or through portholes on the ship’s decks. Ultimately Harold catches Sandoni (presumably “Flash” escapes, but without the money) and literally traps him inside a stack of life preservers. Since his own boat has drifted away, Harold brings the captive Sandoni by getting on the life preservers and literally rowing them to shore, using a broom as his oar. Then he commandeers an open wagon and loads Sandoni on it to drive it to town, though there’s some nice suspense editing as the life preservers binding Sandoni fall off one by one and we wonder whether he’ll still be captive when Harold gets to town in time to return the stolen money and save his dad from being lynched. The film ends as you’d expect, with Harold finally accepted into his family as the equal of his father and brothers, and also ending up with Mary’s love.

One of the ironies of The Kid Brother is that in 1927, Buster Keaton was making one of his lamest vehicles – College, a blatant ripoff of Lloyd’s The Freshman (1925) – while Lloyd was making this ground-breaking and audaciously dark film. Keaton had been forced by his producer, Joseph M. Schenck, to make College after the financial failure of his 1926 masterpiece, The General, and likewise Lloyd ran for cover after the commercial failure of The Kid Brother and the next year made Speedy, a light-hearted comic romp through the streets of New York City that cast Lloyd as the son of a horse-drawn streetcar proprietor who’s being threatened with the loss of his concession if he doesn’t run it every day. (Speedy would be Lloyd’s last silent film; in 1929 he’d make his no-fuss entry into the sound era with a film called Welcome Danger that was based on the same kinds of thrill sequences he’d become famous for in movies like his best-known film, 1923’s Safety Last!) Despite its bland title, The Kid Brother is an audacious film that shows Lloyd not only going for Chaplinesque pathos but also displaying some of Keaton’s mechanical imagination, notably in his combination butter churn and washing machine that washes clothes and automatically hangs them on a clothesline. He has a similarly economical way of washing dishes: after they’re washed, he puts them on a combination drying rack and shelf so he can rack them back on the walls after he’s done with them. Lloyd would embrace the dark side yet again in The Cat’s-Paw (1934), an amazing sound film in which he plays the son of an American missionary couple who aised him in China who comes to the U.S. as an adult for the first time, is drafted to run a campaign for mayor by a political machine as a phony “reformer,” wins and takes the job seriously enough he uses old tricks he learned in China to bust the city’s gangsters. The credited director on The Kid Brother is Ted Wilde, though imdb.com lists other contributors, including Lewis Milestone (already a major name then!), J. A. Howe, and Lloyd himself – and it’s quite clear that here, as in all his major films, Harold Lloyd is really the auteur.