by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The “feature” I ran last night was a Lifetime movie, Love
You to Death, which for some reason I’ve
been unable to find on imdb.com — director Rick Bota (whose name conjured up
the inevitable joke — “Ah, it was directed by a leather pouch used in Spain to
carry wine!”) and star Lindsey Shaw (who was born in 1985 and therefore presumably
played one of the high-school student protagonists’ parents) are credited with
another TV movie from 2015, Secret Summer, but it had different writers and a different story (and Love
You to Death takes place during the school
year, not in summer) that imdb.com lists as “filming,” and Bota also directed Damaged, a 2014 Lifetime movie shown a couple of weeks ago.
There doesn’t seem to be an imdb.com page for this Love You to Death, but after the surprising power of The
Bride He Bought Online, Love You to
Death was a return to the slovenliness of
most of Lifetime’s output. (No fewer than four production companies — Anchor
Bay Films, Dolphin Entertainment, Aircraft Pictures, Corkscrew Media — are
credited with this slice of cheese, as are one “producer,” Anthony Leo; two
“supervising producers,” Sarah Soboleski and Sue Bristow; four “associate
producers,” Megan Ellstrom, Aaron Champion, Javier Riera, and Jennifer Pun; and
four “executive producers,” Scott Henuset, Andrew Rosen, Kevin Kasha, and Bill
O’Dowd.)
The film opens with a powerful sequence in which a young blonde woman
is being chased on a lonely country road by a sinister figure driving a large
black car. “I won’t get in,” she says as the driver pulls up alongside her, but
needless to say he won’t take no for an answer. She tries to flee, but
eventually … well, we presume he catches up with her and kills her because we
see a close-up of her screaming, and the next scene is a jump-cut to a poster
on a tree announcing that she’s missing. It also says her name is Melissa
Kennedy, and the main part of the movie consists of a student at Hampton
Preparatory School, Sylvia, who’s attracted to a mysterious young man named
Lucas who seems to have all the money and material objects he needs (he’s the
child of super-rich parents who, like Natalie Wood’s father in Rebel
Without a Cause, leave the country a lot
and leave him alone in their big house). He drives around in a hot, low-slung
sports car that practically becomes a character in itself, especially the way
he drives it, loudly and obnoxiously, and he bonds with Sylvia mainly due to
their shared interests in comic books (Sylvia is an aspiring comics artist
who’s done a book of her own called Love Me) and silent films (Sylvia works at the local
silent-movie theatre — this town doesn’t look big enough to have a current movie theatre, let alone a recherché revival house showing things like Broken
Blossoms and Nosferatu, clips from both of which appear here, but there it
is) as well as LP records (though the song Sylvia and Lucas listen to on vinyl
on his state-of-the-art turntable sounds pretty much like every other song in
the film). But their relationship is hampered by the way police are sniffing
around Lucas because they suspect him of Melissa’s murder, and in particular by
the harassment of Sylvia’s ex-boyfriend Harry, who works at the local comic
book store and, like Sylvia, has ambitions to make his living as a comic-book
artist.
It’s probably not that
big a surprise — or a spoiler — to say that about two-thirds of the way through
the movie, after throwing us a red herring in the form of an unrelated
character who’s a male former friend of Lucas and/or Sylvia, writer Kat Candler
and director Bota throw us a reversal that Harry, not Lucas, is the real killer
of Melissa — apparently they were dating, she threw him over for hot, rich and
darkly mysterious Lucas, and Harry never forgave her for jilting him for the
rich guy. He got back at her by chasing her through the field and killing her —
only in the meantime the police, still investigating the case, have found her
body and initially linked her to Lucas via his DNA. Eventually, though, the
cops realize the truth after Harry’s violent confrontation with Lucas, in which
he wounds him in the face, and ultimately Harry is arrested and there’s a brief
period in which the traumas of the case put Lucas and Sylvia on the outs, but
they reconcile — or at least start the process — when he shows up at the
silent-movie theatre while she’s putting up the marquee letters for a showing
of Nosferatu. (Come to think of
it, Sunrise might have been a
more appropriate choice since it’s a film about an estranged couple who reconcile, but it’s probably
still under copyright whereas the films they did use are in the public domain.) Love You to
Death is an O.K. movie, but the talent gap
between Christine Conradt as both writer and director of The Bride He
Bought Online and the work of Candler and
Bota here is pretty big; Bota is utterly unable to bring to his work the kind
of atmospherics Conradt supplied for Bride (as I noted in yesterday’s comments, Conradt as director mastered the
suspense editing and Gothic flavor needed to make a script by Conradt the
writer work), and the overall story seems flat and ordinary without Conradt’s
flair to make it come alive.
