by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Stalked at 17, an odd entry in their ongoing series of “_____ at 17” (or sometimes
even earlier, as in Mom at 16)
broadcasts and a pretty typical Christine Conradt script even though this time
she’s only credited with the screenplay and another woman writer, Kathleen
Mattison, gets credit for the “original” story (quotes definitely intended and
appropriate!). Well directed by frequent Conradt collaborator Doug Campbell and
on the whole decently acted, the film tells the story of Angela Curson (Taylor
Spreitler, a former regular on Days of Our Lives who’s done some TV, including two episodes of Law
and Order: Special Victims Unit and a
current run on a five-year-old series called Melissa and Joey, and just finished making a movie called Girl
on the Edge which, ironically, was also a
working title for Stalked at 17),
a 16-year-old high-school senior who, being a put-upon Lifetime teen heroine,
of course comes from a dysfunctional family. Her dad Mark (Brian Jeffrey
Crouse) is a real-estate salesman on the downgrade who’s just had part of his
territory reassigned to someone else (one suspects he’s on the first step of
the slide downhill of the characters in Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross) and whose income has taken a major financial hit
just when he’s worrying about how he’s going to pay to send Angela to college.
Her mom Karen (Amy Pietz) has been a stay-at-home housewife most of Angela’s
life (and it seems hard to believe that these two stocky dark-haired people
could produce skinny blonde Angela, but then the non-resemblance between people
the script tells us are biological relatives is an old, old problem in movies) but is looking for waitressing
work to bolster the family’s income.
Angela and her confidante,
African-American fellow student Tanaya (Shavon Kirksey) — yes, this is yet
another Lifetime movie in which a Black character is assigned the
voice-of-reason role — go to a party at which Angela is cruised and
successfully seduced by 21-year-old college student Chad Bruning (Chuck
Hittinger). The inevitable (in movies, anyway) pregnancy at a single contact
duly occurs — as I’ve noted here before, while it’s possible for a human female to get pregnant from her first
unprotected sexual contact with a human male, human reproduction doesn’t routinely work that way in real life, though it does in the
movies! — though this time around there’s no debate about what to “do” about
the impending child. Chad is absolutely insistent that he’s going to marry
Angela, figure out some way to support her and their newborn, and own up to his
parental responsibilities. The problem with that is that Chad, despite his
surface nice-guy demeanor, is a dysfunctional basket case with some monumental
family problems of his own. He’s being raised by an adoptive mother, Lauren
Bruning (Linda Purl), who’s a member of the City Council where this film takes
place (the city is unnamed but it’s visibly L.A.) and also the head of the
local Chamber of Commerce, and she’s used the clout of both those positions to
spoil Chad rotten and shield him from having to take responsibility for his
actions. Chad tells Angela (and us) that his mom is dead, but she really isn’t;
she’s Kristy (Katrina Norman), who is about to be released on parole after
serving 16 years for armed robbery. She was Lauren’s housemaid and, along with
some friends (presumably including Chad’s biological dad), started robbing
convenience stores to get money to fund her heroin addiction — only while in
prison she’s cleaned up and held down an in-prison job, and is now applying for
parole.
Chad insists on taking over Angela’s life, going ballistic in an (East)
Indian restaurant after she’s served a piece of undercooked chicken and finally
getting himself arrested — and Lauren has had enough and leaves him in jail
instead of bailing him out. When Mark Curson threatens Chad with prosecution
for statutory rape of his daughter, Chad responds by making a series of
harassing phone calls at Mark’s workplace (Mark has Chad’s cell number blocked
and Chad goes out to a pay phone — where does he find one? — to continue his
harassment), and when the Curson parents get a restraining order against Chad
he responds by breaking into their home, kidnapping Angela and stealing the
baby — who by this time has been born and is a boy named Josh whom Angela, her
parents and a guy named Trent (Sidney Franklin) who appears to be her new (and
considerably more stable) boyfriend are working together to raise. The
publicity on this movie said Chad “promises to kill his girlfriend when she
threatens to end the relationship and take their baby,” but that’s not really
apparent in Conradt’s script — though there’s the implicit threat that if
Angela does anything to cross Chad he will totally lose it and end up killing her. On the run with Chad, Chad’s
mom (whom I actually felt sorry for because her involvement in Chad’s crime
will result in the revocation of her parole and her return to prison) and baby
Josh, Angela tricks Chad into letting her stop at a convenience store to buy
ointment for the baby. She hides out in the bathroom (aw, c’mon; what convenience store in the U.S. in 2012 still had a
restroom they’d let customers use?) and scrawls out a message in lipstick on
the stall door, and opportunely the next woman who needs the facility, who’s a
middle-aged African-American (once again a Black character is the deus
ex machina!), reads the note and alerts the
proprietor, who confronts Chad and shoots him with a gun he keeps in his cash
register to deal with potential robbers. (The National Rifle Association must
have loved this movie; it’s one in which a bad guy with a gun is indeed brought
down by a good guy with a gun.) Chad, laying bleeding on the convenience store
floor, offers Angela his gun and
tells her to shoot the proprietor, but she ignores him and waits for the police
to arrive — and, unusually for a Christine Conradt villain, Chad is actually
taken alive instead of dead.
Stalked at 17 is a pretty ordinary Lifetime movie, and the title is a bit deceptive
in that Chad’s attempts to stay in touch with Angela don’t become what we
ordinarily think of as stalking until about halfway through the movie (usually
the term “stalking” in this context means a man following a woman and harassing
her out of the belief that they have, or should have, a relationship but they
really don’t; Chad’s behavior may be way out of line but he and Angela did have sex and conceive a child together, so there’s a
real-world connection between them!), but like a lot of other Lifetime movies
in this genre it’s redeemed, at
least partially, by a terrific performance by the actor playing the bad guy.
Chad Hittinger would seem to have everything required for major stardom (which
is why it seems odd that according to imdb.com his other credits are in
tacky-sounding things like American Reunion, Boogeyman 3 and Sharknado); he’s tall, blond and drop-dead gorgeous, and confronted with a
script that requires him to do a slow, inexorable descent from surface charm to
edginess to out-and-out madness, he nails it at every step of the way. It would
have been nice to see a soft-core porn scene between him and Taylor Spreitler,
but since she was supposed to be playing 16 (even though she was actually 19
when the film was shot) that was probably ruled out by the censors. One
imdb.com reviewer called Spreitler the weak link in the cast, and it’s true she
could have done more to delineate the shock the character would have felt at
Chad’s first outbursts and the sheer terror she’d have been in as his
kidnapping victim, but she’s acceptable and personable and even her relative
woodenness (especially by comparison with the full-blooded performance of her
co-star!) works in a way to project the character’s naïveté. The two older
women in Chad’s life, Linda Purl as his adoptive mother and Katrina Norman as
his real one, also turn in indelible performances that help raise this movie at
least somewhat above the Lifetime norm.
