by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime film was part of a sequence called
“The Wrong _____ ” — a way, I guess, for lesser Lifetime writers and directors
(writer Matthew Jason Walsh and director David DeCoteau, in this case —
DeCoteau’s general interests can be summed up on the imdb.com page for this
film which lists some of his other credits: Devilish Charm, 3 Scream Queens — about three nubile young women who work as
horror-film actors and find themselves face-to-face with a menace similar to
the fictional ones in their films — Sorority Slaughterhouse, Teen
Warlock, which imdb.com for some reason
lists as a “comedy,” and Evil Exhumed) to troll the same territory Christine Conradt plowed in her “The
Perfect _____ ” movies. This one was called The Wrong Roommate and the central character — what Maureen Dowd would
call the “pussy in peril” — is Laurie Valentine (Jessica Morris). Laurie is a
college English and creative writing teacher who as the movie begins has just
broken up with her fiancé, young hot-shot defense attorney Mark (William
McNamara — I was watching this with my friend Brendan and he actually knew this actor; years ago he was working at Brendan’s
now-deceased partner Billy’s restaurant/bar in New York City and telling
everyone around him of his ambition to be an actor, and out of all the waiters
who say they want to be actors, he actually made it, at least as far as a part
in the Bette Midler remake of Stella Dallas and a career of unimpressive but at least frequent credits, until he turns up now as second lead on a
Lifetime film), who, to put it mildly, doesn’t take rejection well.
She dumped
Mark because he caught him cheating on her with another woman (in a modern-day
film the gender of the person he was cheating with has to be specified!) but he
doesn’t want to let her go. Unable to find another place immediately, Laurie
accepts the offer from her sister (whom we never see) to house-sit her nice
place in an affluent part of town (it’s not clear just where all this is taking place), though that will also
mean looking after Laurie’s niece Janice (Dominique Swain) and putting up with
Alan Cypher (Jason-Shane Scott), the hot-looking but mysterious man who’s
renting the guest house on the property. For the first half-hour or so Brendan
and I were trying to figure out which set of Lifetime clichés they were going for here — he was convinced
Mark would kill Alan in a fit of jealousy or something, while I was convinced
Alan would turn out to be the bad guy (in Lifetime movies it almost never happens that a hot, hunky piece of man-meat is a
good guy — usually the more attractive the Lifetime male, the worse villain he
turns out to be; and Scott, shown with his shirt off quite often and revealing
a great set of pecs some of the women in the cast were probably either drooling
over or wishing they had, fit the usual bill for a black-hearted Lifetime male
villain). Later we see a mysterious phone call between Alan and an unseen other
party, which gave away the twist: Alan and Mark are both bad guys. “Alan” is really an ex-con Mark hired to
romance his ex, then break up with her and so devastate her emotionally she’d
come back to Mark — and as part of the plan Alan has rigged up a secret camera
in Laurie’s bedroom and used it to film Laurie stripping for bed. Only “Alan,”
who Mark has carefully set up to look like an artist, complete with works Mark
actually ripped off from the portfolio of a now-deceased graduate student from
20 years earlier, decides he really wants Laurie after all and kills Mark by
hitting him with a blunt object.
He also goes after Floyd (Eric Roberts — and
it’s odd to see him as a good guy
after his bravura villain portrayal in his last Lifetime credit, the clinically
titled but quite good Stalked by My Doctor), a colleague of Laurie’s at college, who first stumbles onto Alan’s
“artistic” masquerade (he recognized the real student’s works from 20 years
before) and then starts researching the background of the mysterious “Alan
Cypher” (giving him a last name that is a synonym for “zero” is by far the most
artful touch in Walsh’s otherwise workmanlike but not especially inspired
script) and stumbles onto at least part of the plot. Alas, Alan catches him at
it and attacks Floyd, later loading him into his car and driving it off a
mountain road, attaching a forged note to make it look like Floyd committed
suicide. Fortunately, Floyd survives the assault and the staged car crash, and
is ultimately found and taken to the hospital, battered and in and out of
consciousness but still alive. Meanwhile Alan, for reasons that remain pretty
ambiguous, attempts to blackmail Laurie (into doing what?) by kidnapping her niece Janice (ya remember her
niece Janice?), leading to an action
sequence in which Alan, or whatever his real name is, gets his comeuppance (I
was having a hard time staying awake for the last half-hour and I’m not sure I
remember it all) — and, surprisingly, there isn’t the usual tag scene pairing Our Heroine with some
nice man who’ll make her forget about the other two males of the human species
that did her so terribly wrong. (I was rather hoping she’d hook up either with
Floyd or the burglar-alarm installer we saw in one sequence — Alan had staged a
phony burglary in Laurie’s house to make it seem like Mark was still stalking
her — who was played by African-American actor Jerrell Pippens, a former
football player who despite the brevity of his part I found even hotter than
Jason Shane-Scott!) The Wrong Roommate is a perfectly serviceable Lifetime movie, better than some, worse
than some, squarely in the middle of their output, neither shiningly good like Restless
Virgins nor shockingly (but campily) bad
like Obsession, good workmanlike
entertainment if you can take the (by now) numbing overfamilarity of their
formulae.
