by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Mentor turned out
to be a typical Lifetime production (no production company credits are up on
imdb.com yet), co-written by Christine Conradt with Susan Atkinson and Tony
Lefresne, the last of whom also directed, and so tightly scripted to the usual Conradt formula (even
though she had two co-writers and the supposed “inspiration” of a true story)
one wonders why she didn’t call it The Perfect Mentor. According to imdb.com, which credits Conradt with
the script solo even though the on-screen credits list Atkinson and Lefresne as
well, Christine Conradt was born October 7, 1973 in Omaha, and she has
well-scrubbed blonde good looks that only hint at the dark fantasies that come
out in her scripts. (Actually she looks like the same sort of physical type
that usually gets cast as the “pussy in peril” in her scripts.) In last week’s
Lifetime “world premiere” “Social Saturday” movie, The Secret Sex
Life of a Single Mom, Conradt had tried to
deviate from her usual formula; as I commented about it, “It’s certainly different from the scripts that made Christine
Conradt’s reputation and made her the Lifetime auteur —
there aren’t any psychos (even Robert, the closest thing this film has to a
villain, is merely a bad old-fashioned male-chauvinist husband), there aren’t
any ‘perfect’ people drawing the innocent heroine into a web of craziness and
physical peril, there isn’t any big last-minute rescue in which the police have
to come in and save Our Heroine from the person in whom she’s placed too much
trust.” Well, this time around Conradt fans can breathe easier: The Mentor
does contain a psycho who poses as a
“perfect” person to draw the innocent heroine into a web of craziness and
physical peril, and there is a big
last-minute rescue in which the police have to come in and save Our Heroine
from the person in which she’s placed too much trust. (And it looks from the
titles of Conradt’s upcoming projects on imdb.com — Guilty at 17, listed as “completed,” and My Life as a Dead Girl, currently in post-production, that like the proverbial
shoemaker she’s sticking to her last.)
Our Heroine is Elizabeth May (Jes
Macallan), who has a nice lifestyle as a stay-at-home suburban mom with her
tennis-pro husband Brian (Nic Bishop) and their two daughters, Pippa (Maggie
Scott) and Meghan (Abigail Scott — it looks like the casting director got two
actual sisters to portray the on-screen sisters), when one day as they’re
driving back home from their cabin in the country to their nice suburban estate
(just how much do tennis pros at fancy country clubs make, anyway?), Brian is distracted by his cell phone, he sees
another car stalled out on the road, his own car crashes and the other three
are unscathed but her older daughter Pippa is killed. The remaining Mays go to
such demented lengths to keep Pippa’s memory alive — even to writing her a birthday
card and sending it aloft on helium balloons, presumably so it will reach her
in heaven — that Meghan feels guilty about having any fun at all because Pippa
isn’t there to share it. (It reminded me of the similarly demented lengths Bela
Lugosi’s character in The Invisible Ghost
went to keep the memory of his presumably dead wife alive, including serving
her a meal every year on the anniversary of her “death” — though, being a
character in a Lugosi film, she isn’t dead at all; she’s hiding out on the
grounds of his home and periodically hypnotizing him into killing someone.) The
strains of the grief process lead Brian and Elizabeth to separate and Elizabeth
to apply to resume her former career as a teacher, and since she’s been out of
the profession for a few years her school’s principal (Yolanda Wood — yes, once
again, the big authority figures, including the lead detective who investigates
the inevitable murder midway through, are African-American!) suggests that
Elizabeth be assigned a mentor to show her the ropes. Fellow teacher Paul
Allenham (Aaron Douglas) eagerly snaps up the assignment, though we know he’s a crazy with a psychopathic hatred of women. None
of the other characters know that, but we do because we’ve previously seen him
accost a woman, Vanessa (Nichelle Aiden), in a bar and, despite never having
seen her before, denounce her as a slut. The bartender calls the cops and the
cops escort him out but take a note of the incident and get Vanessa’s contact
information. (After Elliot Rodger’s recent rampage in Santa Barbara, in which he’s alleged to have killed seven people and wounded 13 to get revenge against every woman who refused to have sex with him, this scene no doubt plays quite differently than Conradt and her collaborators thought it would when they wrote it.)
Meanwhile, Paul shows all the classic indicia of a movie stalker;
he goes through Elizabeth’s garbage, secretly photographs her and collects
images of her on one of his apartment walls, and poses as a man named “John
Connor” to sign up for Brian’s tennis lessons so he can keep an eye on his
unrequited inamorata’s husband as well.
(Christine Conradt may have intentionally studded her script with references to
rock musicians; I found it amusing that the stalker has the same first name as
one of the Beatles and takes an alias that’s another Beatle’s first name, and
the husband’s name, “Brian May,” is that of the lead guitarist and co-principal
songwriter of Queen, who for some reason has been virtually forgotten even
though he, unlike Freddy Mercury, is still alive.) Paul gets jealous when
Elizabeth goes to lunch with another teacher at Vista Avenue Elementary School,
Pam (Renny Grames), instead of him, and when Pam tells Paul that Elizabeth
isn’t interested in him that way, Paul
responds by killing Pam and trying to frame Milo (Rocky Myers, easily the
hottest guy in this movie!), the school janitor, for the crime. Through all of
this Paul is incessantly harangued by his sister Amber (Clare Niederpruem), who
when they were both 17 (they were fraternal twins) slipped him an anonymous Valentine’s
Day note, left him wondering which schoolgirl thought he was hot, then dropped
the bomb that she sent it as a prank because no one would want to have sex with him. In response he got angry
and smothered her with a pillow, killing her, then posed as the grief-stricken
brother and years later attracted Elizabeth (though not romantically on her
part) by saying that since they’d both lost family members, they had a lot in
common and should be friends. Alas, like Anthony Perkins’ mother in Psycho, Amber has survived in Paul’s consciousness and periodically
has “conversations” with him, goading him to go after women and then attack or
kill them.
It all ends pretty much the way you think it’s going to end, with
Paul drugging Brian’s water bottle and kidnapping him, ordering him to write a
note that will make his murder look like suicide, then actually shooting him —
though we get a close-up of Brian’s eyes blinking, just to assure us before the
last commercial break that Brian isn’t quite dead and there’s still a chance he
can recover — and then Paul goes to Elizabeth, tells her he’s killed her
husband so they can be together, and she plays along until she can grab his
gun, they both reach for it (Maurine Watkins, your plagiarism attorney is
returning your call from his vacation villa on the French Riviera, which he
thanks you for paying for) and Paul is incapacitated, though at the end it’s
shown that he, too, is still alive and the cops take him into custody. The
Mentor is good Christine Conradt — and her
director and co-writer, Tony Lefresne, backs up her script with appropriately
Gothic direction (even though there’s one bizarre sequence when Pam is about to
be murdered, where he quotes the opening setups from the shower scene in Psycho before he and Conradt pull a switcheroo on us and have Paul
kill Pam, not in the shower, but in bed
with a pillow the way Paul killed his sister Amber years before) — though she’s
written better scripts than this. Still, it’s an indication of how well she’s
mastered her formula, and the actors in the three leads inhabit their parts
well enough even though I would have wished for someone hotter than Nic Bishop
as Brian — the man is supposed to be an
athlete, after all!
