by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
First up on Lifetime’s
schedule yesterday, at 6 p.m., was The Wrong Car, an item in Lifetime’s latest cycle — “The Wrong
_____,” as opposed to “The Perfect _____,” “The _____ S/he Met Online,” or
“_____ at 17.” It was shot under the working title Black Car — a cleverer name because it was a pun on both the
literal and colloquial meanings of the word “black” — but someone either at the
production companies, Moody Independent and Marvista Entertainment, or at
Lifetime itself wanted the phrase “The Wrong … ” to be in the title to key it
in with others in the cycle, including the ones I recently watched and
reviewed, The Wrong Roommate and Wrong Swipe (the
working title for Wrong Swipe was simply Swipe, and
from the title I had expected the movie to be about someone who used a credit
or debit card in the wrong place and got their identity stolen, not someone who
tried out a computer-dating service called Swipe and attracted a stalker). The
Wrong Car was an auteur work given that it was written, directed and
edited by the same person, John Stimpson, and for its first third it’s actually
a quite good suspense thriller revolving (almost inevitably) around the Uber
ride-sharing service — or “NetCar,” as Stimpson calls it.
The central character
is Trudy O’Donnell (Danielle Savre), a law student who’s taking a class in
criminology from a teacher named Dr. Bell (Jeremiah Kissel) — was Stimpson
deliberately copying the name from Dr. James Bell, the medical lecturer at
Edinburgh University in the 1880’s who was one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s teachers
and supposedly the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes? She also had a bad breakup
with a boyfriend two years earlier but only briefly mentions it, nor do we see
him. In the opening scene she gets a ride home from a NetCar being driven by
Charles (Kevin G. Cox), an O.K.-looking but rather nerdish guy who wants to
date her, but she’s not interested in him that way and politely turns him down. On a later evening
she lets her roommate Gretchen Healey (Francia Raisa) talk her into going to a
club; Gretchen drove her there but Trudy decides to bail in mid-evening and
hails a NetCar … only this NetCar driver turns out to be a phony: he’s a serial rapist who poses
as a NetCar driver, picks up hot-looking women outside clubs, gives them water
from a bottle he’s injected with the “date-rape drug” Rohypnol (one can imagine
the direct-to-consumer ads for this stuff, with Bill Cosby in Dr. Huxtable drag
as its spokesperson), then takes them to a motel whose desk clerk, Roger (Rhet
Kidd), is in on the plot, and rapes them while they’re too stoned to resist.
This happens to Trudy, who wakes up in the motel with only the dimmest notion
of how she got there, and her memories of the evening, such as they are, are
fragmentary and feature an apparent hallucination involving a guy looking like
Chucky hovering over the proceedings. She goes through a humiliating five-hour
rape exam at the hands of the police, who confirm that she was drugged but are
unable to match the DNA of the semen inside her to anything in a
law-enforcement database (they find bits of latex, indicating that the rapist
wore a condom but it broke), and they give her a supply of the morning-after
pill and a referral to an HIV testing service. (It’s indicative of the degree to
which HIV and AIDS still have a hold on the public imagination that they don’t think of advising her to get screened for classic
STD’s.)
Trudy’s case is assigned to a young African-American detective named
Jackson (Christina Elmore) — we’re not told her first name — but Trudy gets
frustrated at the slow pace of Jackson’s investigation and decides to take
matters into her own hands. She asks her classroom friend Charles for
information on NetCar and uses it to sign on as a driver herself in hopes of
tracing and catching her rapist. Among her first NetCar clients is an
investment broker named Donovan (Jackson Davis — any relation to Jefferson?),
whom we’re immediately suspicious of because he’s nice-looking and in
Lifetime’s iconography nice-looking men are almost always villains. About
one-third of the way through the movie Trudy picks up as NetCar fares Carlos
(Walley Walkker) and Juan (Jesse Gabbard), two Latino gangbangers who are
originally planning to go to a strip club (they boast that they don’t need
strip clubs to find sex partners themselves but one of them has a sister who
works there), then put their guns in Trudy’s face and demand first that she
give them a five-star customer rating, then pick up a wounded comrade at the
other end of town and take him to a secret doctor who will patch him up and
extract the bullet without reporting it to the police. It’s at this point that The
Wrong Car changes from a pretty good
suspense tale to a particularly rancid piece of Lifetime cheese, as virtually nothing in the rest of Stimpson’s script makes a lick of
sense. It’s just one weird plot twist after another, as Trudy enlists her
roommate Gretchen to join her in her nightly surveillance, they follow the
black SUV that picked Trudy up for her rape on the streets and follow it to the motel, where the driver gets
out — and it’s Donovan, holding an out-of-it woman and half-carrying,
half-dragging her into the room. Trudy calls Detective Jackson, and Jackson
sends out a car — only when the officer (Chris Neville) arrives, Donovan is in
the room but the woman isn’t. (Anyone who’s ever seen a Marx Brothers movie
could figure out how that happened: he’s rented two rooms, with adjoining doors, and got the
woman hidden in the other room before letting the officer in.)
Eventually Trudy
decides to enlist Gretchen as a decoy, having her hang out in front of the club
where Trudy herself was picked up, and Donovan duly picks her up and feeds her
the drugged water — only Gretchen has an identical but uncontaminated bottle of
water in her purse and she substitutes the clean bottle for Donovan’s dirty
one. (How did she and Trudy know what brand of water Donovan buys?) Donovan
drives Gretchen to the motel and registers (though the desk clerk warns him
this is the last time he’ll accept Donovan’s $500 bribe to cooperate), Trudy
watches from her car as Donovan takes her into the room (the one thing she doesn’t think to do is use her smartphone to photograph
him; given that the police have been skeptical, to say the least, of her claim that
Donovan is the rapist, one would think she would want to document it), and
writer-director-editor Stimpson has yet another surprise up his sleeve: there
are two men in the room to rape
Gretchen, Donovan and the guy in the Chucky mask, who when it’s pulled off his
face by a vengeful Trudy turns out to be … her milquetoast classmate Charles,
who’s actually Donovan’s brother as well as his partner in crime. There’s a
typical end-of-Lifetime-movie struggle in the room before Det. Jackson arrives
to take both Donovan and Charles into custody. The Wrong Car could have been a quite good little vest-pocket
suspense thriller if Stimpson hadn’t piled unbelievable plot twist on top of
unbelievable plot twist — down to having Carlos and Juan, who decided they
“owed” Trudy a favor after their ride from hell with her, showing up at the
motel for the final confrontation and being her “muscle.” Stimpson has real
flair as a director, both in creating atmosphere and getting good performances
out of his leads (Danielle Sayre is utterly convincing as the avenging angel
out not only to catch her own rapist but get the guy off the street before he
victimizes anyone else, and I also quite liked Rhet Kidd as the sleazy desk
clerk), but maybe he’ll be better off if he sticks to directing movies based on
scripts he hasn’t written!
