by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched last night’s
Lifetime “world premiere,” a film called Fatal Flip, a pretty routine production from that channel — it
was also shot under the working title The Fixer Upper but if Christine Conradt had written it (she
didn’t, though it might have been better if she had!) she would have called it The
Perfect Handyman. Jeff (Michael Steger) and
Alex (Dominique Swain), a young (straight) couple who’ve been living together
but have avoided even getting formally engaged, much less married (perhaps
they’ve just got “engaged to be engaged,” like that couple in an insane
marriage-and-family audio-visual film from Coronet in the 1950’s the Mystery
Science Theatre 3000 people famously mocked),
decide to take out a loan, buy a dilapidated house somewhere (this is nominally
taking place in New England but, being a Lifetime production, it was almost
certainly shot in Canada), fix it up themselves and then “flip” it — sell it to
someone else for a higher price that will cover the loan and their expenses.
Only because of the terms of the loan, if they can’t finish the job and resell
the house in 45 days they’re going to be socked with heavy interest penalties
and will lose so much on the deal they’ll probably have to declare bankruptcy.
They quickly realize they’re in over their heads on the repair job, and one day
at the analogue of Home Depot in this fictional world they run into Nick (Mike
Faiola), an all-purpose handyman.
Jeff cuts a deal with Nick to hire him to
help them with the remodel in exchange for a share of the profits they expect
from flipping the house, and since he’s homeless part of the deal is that he
can live in the house while they do the job. There seem to be only two other
significant characters, both women: the realtor (or is that “RealtorTM”?)
who sold them the house (unidentified, at least this early, on imdb.com’s cast
list), and Alex’s friend Roslyn (Tatiana Ali — the only cast member I’ve heard
of before), whose plot function is obscure but who at least provides some nice
eye candy for any straight guys who might be watching this. Both the women are instantly attracted to
Nick and they even make a bet with each other over who can get him first, but
Nick is casting lascivious eyes at Alex and challenging her to go to bed with
him just to prove she wants something more than the boring life she’s trying to
escape (both she and Jeff worked at a law firm and turned in their notices
simultaneously to take their flyer into fixer-upper-land). Of course, being a
reasonably attractive man in a Lifetime movie, he’s also got other quirks: we
see him having phone conversations with a woman with whom he’s presumably in
cahoots in some sort of scheme that involves latching on to a young couple
attempting to fix up and “flip” a house, joining their project, acing them out
of the house and killing them in the process. (In the “teaser” opening we’ve
seen Nick sealing up a wall in a previous project and we hear the muffled
screams of the woman he’s sealed up inside — so at one point writers Maureen
Bharoocha, who also directed, and Ellen Huggins had read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The
Cask of Amontillado” and decided it would be fun to do that plot twist in a
modern context.)
It’s only at the end that we learn Nick was only having those
phone calls in his imagination; he was really a carpenter who lost his own house via foreclosure
and responded by freaking out, killing his wife by suffocating her with a piece
of plastic sheeting, sealing her in the walls of the house he was being forced
to vacate, and setting off in search of other people with whom he can relive
this scenario. Alex’s Black friend Roslyn exits about two-thirds of the way
through when she lets Nick take her up to his redoubt in the house’s attic and
fuck her brains out, only in the morning she wakes up before he does and finds
a business card of his with another name on it; she goes on a (fictitious)
Internet search engine and digs up the truth about Nick, but when (like a
stupid character in a 1930’s movie) she confronts him directly — she’s gone to
the house hoping to warn Jeff and Alex, but that’s the night they’ve picked to
do a “date night” and so Nick is the only one there — he smothers her in a big piece of plastic sheeting and leaves her
body in the basement for later disposal. It creaks to a close when Nick makes
an outright pass at Alex, she turns him down, Jeff gives Nick a week’s notice,
then Nick spies on Alex through a crack in the walls as she’s taking a bath
(using an elaborate plumbing fixture from the house’s original 19th
century equipment Nick had successfully restored) and comes in on her while
she’s naked in the tub. Naturally she resists, and just then Jeff comes in on
them and orders Nick off the property immediately. Nick responds by sneaking
into their circuit breakers and breaking them all so the house’s electrical
power will cut out and they’ll be unable to turn it back on — and when they go
into the basement to fix it, he’s waiting for them with murderous intentions.
Only somehow Jeff and Alex are able to overpower him and Alex smothers him in the plastic sheeting, but isn’t able to kill
him; while they’re waiting for the cops to arrive he manages to escape, and the
final shot is of him in another city (but still dressed in the same plaid
flannel shirt and blue jeans he was wearing when he was introduced),
approaching another young man in a big hardware store to pull the scam again …
Fatal
Flip is a pretty
straightforward Lifetime movie, neither as bad as some of them nor as good as
others, and though director Bharoocha gets some nice Gothic effects during the
silent scenes in which Nick is sinisterly stalking Jeff and Alex through the
crumbling old pile they’re trying to restore into something saleable, she’s
hamstrung by the weaknesses of her cast. By far the best sequence is the marvelous
soft-core porn scene between Nick and Roslyn — and its interracial aspect just
adds a thrilling frisson — staged
in such a way that suggests he’s just one of those stick-it-in-and-get-off
kinds of guys who is out for his own pleasure no matter how much he roughs up
his partner in the process, while she seems happy with him that way, the rougher the better. (It’s
interesting that we get this subtle and dramatic insight into her sexual
desires when we learn virtually nothing about what she’s like outside the bedroom.) It doesn’t help that Mike Faiola as Nick is a reasonably
attractive man but hardly the drop-dead gorgeous babe-magnet the script tells
us he is, or that as his rival Jeff Michael Steger looks like the result of a
bizarre genetic experiment that attempted to cross-breed Harry Langdon and Tim
Allen. (He’s actually got a nice bod — and in the basket-to-basket department
he seems better hung than Faiola — but his face is pretty homely and too
undefined to sit on top of the rest of him.) I can’t really tell you how good
these people are as actors since the script doesn’t require much from them in
the way of acting, but I suspect there’s a reason Tatiana Ali is the only cast member here you’re
likely to have heard of before!
