by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched what turned out to be a quite good Lifetime
TV-movie, the “world premiere” of something called #popFan — the Twitter-style hashtag at the beginning and the
capital letter in the middle of an otherwise blended-together lower-case word
are in the official title on the Lifetime Web site, though imdb.com lists it as
the more normal “PopFan” — still one word with a capital letter in the middle,
in that horrible style of nomenclature bequeathed to us by computer software
writers in the 1980’s, but at least beginning with a capital letter and not a hashtag. Oddly, despite all the to-do about
hashtags — not only does the film’s official title begin with one, but so do
all the credits: “#directed by Vanessa Parise,” “#written by Dean Orion,” etc.
— though the film alludes to social media in general there isn’t a specific
reference to Twitter in its plot. I guess the filmmakers just thought putting
hastags all over the title and credits would make it look cool. Anyway, #popFan is basically Stephen King’s story Misery with the genders reversed; instead of a male romance
writer held hostage by a crazed female fan, it’s a female pop singer and
aspiring actress held hostage by a crazed male fan.
When we first see Ava Pierce (Chelsea Kane) —
the imdb.com page gives “Maclaine” as the last name of her character but it was
probably changed in the later stages of writing, too late for imdb.com to get
the information before the film was released — she’s at a release party for her
new CD and the hot, sexy video she’s shot for it in which she does a strip
tease and practically rapes the camera. Her manager, Damon (Danny Wattley), has
an offer for her to make a serious film with a major director (carefully
unnamed) but she wouldn’t be the star and she would only have four scenes, so
she’s less than thrilled. Her boyfriend, investment banker Curtis Flemming (Ben
Hollingsworth), is offended by the fact that she’s having the biggest hit of
her career by selling herself as a sex object, and Ava (she’s referred to
throughout the film almost entirely by her first name, and so are her real-life
colleagues “Taylor” and “Miley”) gets back at him by picking out one of the
guys at the party, practically going down on him in front of everybody, then
doing a deep kiss with a Black woman (breaking both racial and gender taboos), inviting the white guy
she’d just nearly raped to join them for a three-way — and suddenly noticing,
after Curtis threw a hissy-fit, that at least five people have been photographing
the whole thing with the video cameras on their smartphones, waiting and
practically drooling at the prospect of posting the scenes to YouTube. Ava,
disgusted with herself over the whole scene, decides to take some time off from
her career as a hot pop star and drive up from New York City to New England,
hide out in one of the picturesque local inns, and write some new songs. Only
along the way she has to get gas — there are some nice little gags put in by
#writer Orion to the effect that she’s so unused to driving herself she doesn’t
know which side of her car the gas cap is on or how to get it open — and the
gas-station attendant (a job that in the 1930’s was a symbol of honest
proletarianism and the beginnings of a successful strive at least to the middle
class, if not to the very top, but now reads very differently given that all a
modern-day gas-station attendant has to do is take your money and hit the
button that turns on the self-serve pump) is a young man named Xavier (Nolan
Gerard Funk) who warns her that a “nor’easter” is coming up — and being the
naïve child of privilege she is, she needs to have it explained that that means
a terrible storm.
Xavier insists on pronouncing the “x” in his name — it comes
out sounding like “ex-avier” — which leads Ava to nickname him “X-Man” (and,
much to his credit as an actor, Nolan Gerard Funk also pronounces the “t” in
“often”!) — and at first he seems like the nicest guy you could imagine,
especially after Ava loses control of her car in the storm, the car is wrecked,
she’s knocked unconscious and when she comes to she’s in Xavier’s bed. Of
course, appearances are deceiving; Xavier has the soft-spoken solicitousness of
Norman Bates in Psycho but any
hardened movie-watcher knows he’s probably hiding a black heart, or at least a
crazy head, inside. He also claims to have served as a U.S. Marine in
Afghanistan, but when Ava gets suspicious and drugs his pasta to put him out
for a while so she can go searching into the secret room of the lighthouse, she
finds a whole wall plastered with pictures of herself — into some of which
Xavier has inserted himself, presumably via Photoshop — and also a desk drawer
containing a file marked “MILITARY” whose contents are a series of letters he’s
received back from his attempts to enlist, all of which have declared him unfit
for service, presumably due to his mental issues. Ava tries to escape in
Xavier’s truck but he catches her — I was thinking #writer Orion was going to
pull the old gag that she can’t drive a stick-shift, but instead he did the gag
that she can’t get it started because she hasn’t pulled out the choke, never
before having driven (or probably even seen) a car that had one — and when next we see
her she’s in his bed but he’s got her tied up, suspended above the ceiling by
rope in a classic bondage pose. Not that Xavier wants to rape her — oh, no,
Lifetime was probably worried what sort of rating this would get from the TV
board (just as Ava’s descent into crazed diva-dom carefully does not include drug use, unlike #Orion’s obvious real-life
prototypes for her character) — he wants her to reproduce the sexy video for
her mega-hit song in his living room with him filming it on his cell phone.
Meanwhile, Ava’s entourage, including Curtis, Damon and Ava’s mom Tracy (Kehli
O’Byrne, who frankly looks like her older sister than her mother), is worried
about her — they have one clue in that Ava found her cell phone in Xavier’s
back room, used it to make a call, said she was being held in a New England
lighthouse and would call right back with the exact location, only her battery
died — and, determined not to involve the police for fear of starting a scandal
that would damage Ava’s career, Curtis and Damon go out to find her themselves.
First they have the predictable wild-goose chase among all New England’s old lighthouses, and then when they
find the one Xavier, who even though the military didn’t let him still got
really good with guns (and of course in a country basically governed by the National Rifle Association had no problem
getting plenty of them!), drills three precisely aimed bullets into Damon’s
chest, killing him instantly. He gets a shot at Curtis but Curtis is protected
because he’s hiding behind a rock. Now, what does Curtis do? Does he do the
obvious thing and, while he’s still covered by the rock, take out his cell
phone and call the police? A director like Alfred Hitchcock would probably have
cut to a shot of his cell phone on the dashboard or floor of his car — rubbing
in the irony that he forgot to bring it when he would most need it — but
#Parise and her #writer can’t be bothered with that. Instead they have Curtis
shot in the leg, non-fatally but with no access to pain medication (Xavier
flushed the rest of his supply after Ava drugged him with some of it) and held
by a crazy guy who in the film’s weirdest scene brings out a power saw and
threatens Curtis with a D.I.Y. amputation, then tells Ava that Curtis has just
shown himself unworthy of her by peeing in his pants at the prospect.
Eventually Xavier enlists Ava’s help in getting rid of Damon’s body (ya
remember Damon?), including
sending her to get boulders so he can weight it down so it will sink into the
sea, and Ava clubs him with it, knocking him unconscious long enough for her
and Curtis to regain control of the situation and drive off together at the end
once Curtis, still without intervention of the authorities, has finally taken
Xavier out.
Despite the typical thriller-plot contrivances and holes, and the
lack of a sense that Ava has learned much from her horrible experience, #popFan (shot under the working title Lighthouse until someone at the #production company, TLH
Productions, realized that that wouldn’t tell audiences much about what the
story was) is actually a quite engaging movie, suspensefully #directed by
#Parise, decently #written by #Orion (even if he could have worked on some of the sillier devices and made
the story make at least a bit more sense), and surprisingly well #acted.
Chelsea Kane is just right as Ava, making us feel for the character as she
starts out flirting with the dark side without any real knowledge of what the
dark side is — knowledge that the main story will impart to her — and the two
men are not only quite hot (it’s a joy to see Nolan Gerard Funk shirtless and,
if anything, Ben Hollingsworth is even sexier — odd to see a Lifetime movie in
which the good guy is more exciting physically than the bad guy!) but good
actors, with Funk in particular managing the nice-guy-turned-psycho act almost
as well as its originator, Anthony Perkins (and he doesn’t have Norman Bates’
excuse that his mother made him do it — even though I couldn’t help but think
that when Ava started rummaging around in his forbidden room, she was going to
find Xavier’s stuffed mom hidden in the fruit cellar). I’d like to see either
of these guys again — and I’d like to see Chelsea Kane again, too; though she’s
quite a bit slimmer than the original she’s hot enough and has the right kind
of cooing sexuality I wouldn’t mind seeing her in a Marilyn Monroe biopic.
