Murder at a Hotel (Petre NL, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Lifetime’s next movie, Murder at the Hotel, which doesn’t have an imdb.com page yet – I’ve gleaned what information I could from taking notes during the credits and bits and pieces from other online sites – was, if anything, even worse than A Husband to Die For: The Lisa Aguilar Story, shown just before it on September 14. It opens at an airport heaven knows where – my guess was New York City but it might have been Denver, a major “hub” in American air travel’s hub-and-spokes system of routing – in which the planes are all grounded by a massive snowstorm. (We get a few shots of the planes and runways buried in snow.) A middle-aged man named Evan insists that he must be in San Francisco the next morning for an all-important meeting that could literally be a life-or-death matter for him. He chews out Jen, the airline’s ticket clerk, only to be put in his place by the lead character, district attorney Megan Maris (Samora Smallwood). Megan tells Evan to stop harassing Jen over weather issues that are way beyond her control. Megan is traveling back to San Francisco with her husband Jeff and their daughter Lisa, and Megan is clearly African-American while Jeff is white and Lisa is mixed-race and strongly resembles her mom. (Kudos to casting director Anna Weller for finding a young woman who resembles Samora Smallwood enough she’s believable as her daughter.) This reminded me of my rather grim comments during the Biden administration that the two most powerful and influential Black women in the U.S., then-Vice President Kamala Harris and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, were both married to white men. I wondered what message that sent to Black men that they had no hope of meeting and marrying powerful and influential Black women. Eventually the airport and airline give up on attempting any departures that night and offer to put up all the stranded passengers at the Montpelier Hotel and get buses to take them there.

Among the people there are Brad (Matt Wills), Megan’s ex from her college days, who makes it clear pretty early on that he’d like to delete that “ex” from his status in her life; and Nicole Wallen, a tall, statuesque blonde woman who seems to be cruising Megan’s husband Jeff. Jen, the woman ticket agent at the airport, is having an affair with Rick Walk, head of security at the Montpelier Hotel, though she doesn’t want anybody to know about that. (Why not? Unless either or both of them are married to other people, there’d be no reason to conceal their affair. Also Rick is white and Jen is Black, but in a movie like this where the heroine is Black but both the men in her life are white, that’s no big deal either.) There’s also Landon, a quite boyishly handsome young man (he reminded me of Tim Wayne, an old friend and fellow Gay activist my husband Charles and I knew in the mid-1990’s when we’d just started dating) of whom we get some choice topless glimpses when he and Lisa sneak into the hotel’s hot tub. We see a security guard for the hotel electrocuted with a stun gun and pushed into the hotel pool by an unseen assailant, so we know there’s going to be – pardon the pun – murder at the hotel. Nicole asks Jeff to walk her to her room in the hotel, and shortly thereafter Megan goes to the room she and Jeff are supposed to be sharing. Jeff isn’t there, and neither is Lisa, who has a room of her own. Megan makes ever more frantic attempts to reach both of them. Megan’s search for her husband and daughter leads her to a storage closet, where she finds the body of her ex Brad knifed to death.

She’s fled there not only to find her family but also because Evan, her nemesis from the airport, has mobilized the hotel staff to make a citizen’s arrest of her for murdering Brad. Alas, Megan is locked in the storage room by her unknown assailant, and has to flee by sliding down a chute into the laundry room. Landon dropped a key clue when he was with Lisa in the hot tub; he told her he had a sister (he doesn’t say whether she was older or younger) who died. Megan doesn’t know that, of course, but we do. We’ve also seen brief cut-ins of exactly where Jeff and Lisa are; they’re tied up in room 429 of the hotel and are clearly being held hostage. The culprit turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Nicole Wallen, who was the wife of a particularly notorious financial scam artist and pedophile (think Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein as the same person) whom Megan successfully prosecuted. (Obviously in Lifetime movies, unlike in real life, scumbags like that actually face the consequences of their actions.) Nicole’s scheme was to force Megan to record a video admitting that the witnesses against her husband were all lying and Megan had suborned perjury to do it. But Landon, Nicole’s son, didn’t think his mom’s scheme went far enough. He decided to knock off Brad and frame Megan for the crime, so she’d be exposed not only as an unethical prosecutor but a murderess. During the inevitable final confrontation in room 429, Jeff manages to work himself free from his bonds and attack Landon, and ultimately both bad guys are subdued and the cops – the real cops – arrest them. As partial payment for their ordeal, Jen upgrades Megan’s, Jeff’s, and Lisa’s tickets for the return flight to San Francisco (once the weather is clear enough they can leave at last), and Evan the asshole businessman has to wait and stew as they’re let on the plane before he is. Also Megan has arranged for Evan to be seated next to an overweight mother and her two bratty kids as her revenge against him.

Murder at the Hotel is pretty thin gruel, and it doesn’t help that though Jeff is considerably more grounded than Brad as a character, we’re given so many crotch shots of Brad flashing a really nice basket that we get the impression that, at least physically, Megan traded down. Murder at the Hotel was from the atelier of the Johnson Production Group (Timothy O. Johnson was one of the plethora of producers listed), and it was made by two old Johnson hands: Alexander Carrière (director) and Chris Sivertson (writer). Carrière manages to get a few nicely Gothic shots even within the unpromising confines of a modern hotel, but Sivertson’s rather silly script defeats him. My husband Charles sat out both A Husband to Die For: The Lisa Aguilar Story and Murder at the Hotel, spending his time doing work for an online course at the computer, and frankly he didn’t miss much from either movie!