by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Lifetime “world
premiere” on Saturday, June 11 was Killing Mommy, a.k.a. Deadly Daughters, a surprisingly engaging thriller with a big twist
about two-thirds of the way through (which was, alas, “spoiled” by the Lifetime
trailer for the film — more on that later), “presented” by Pierre David and Tom
Berry (names that have previously been associated with a lot of Lifetime
thrillers that have run the gamut from suspenseful to silly) and directed by
Curtis James Crawford and Anthony Dufresne from a script by Trent Haaga. It’s
slow going at first mainly because there isn’t anyone in it we actually like: it’s about a mother and her two grown
(25-year-old) twin daughters, though the twins don’t look that much alike, at
least partly because they’re deliberately costumed differently to reflect their
lifestyles. Mom is Eve Hanson (Claire Rankin), who’s about to marry Winston
Berlin (Rob Stewart), the guy she’s been dating for four years since her
previous husband Harlan (Jeff Teravainen) died in a bizarre accident: he was
restoring a 1965 Mustang as a birthday present for one of his daughters when the
jack that was holding the car up gave way and the car fell on him and crushed
him. The daughters are Juliana (Yvonne Zima), who wears her hair long and
colors it auburn (mom is blonde) and is a wanna-be fashionista who’s tearing through the family fortune left
behind by her self-made father while ostensibly studying to be a fashion
designer; and Deborah — usually called “Deb” and also played by Yvonne Zima —
who has black hair that makes her look like she’s auditioning to play Patti
Smith in a biopic and generally wears a black leather jacket, a black T-shirt
hailing the joys of LSD, and black jeans. She’s also got a ring piercing on her
lower lip. (Cinthia Burke and her associates in the makeup department deserve
kudos for making the two Zimas look similar when they’re supposed to and
dramatically different when they’re supposed to.) None of these women come off
as sympathetic characters — mom seems like a controlling bitch, Juliana a
spoiled one and Deb someone who’s going out of her way to rebel by drinking,
picking up sleazy guys at a dive bar, and giving herself points for being
“clean” because at least she isn’t doing “hard drugs” anymore.
Mom’s boyfriend
Winston doesn’t come off any better; he’s obviously a gold-digger who’s just
after Eve for her money, which he’s already lost $100,000 of in a bad stock
deal, which hasn’t stopped him from pestering her for control over the rest of
the fortune. Given the title, the main suspense early on is over which sister
is going to kill mom, or try to, for her money — Juliana, Deb or both of them
in combination — and it seems to be Deb when we see her actually try to run her
mom down in a parking lot. Only about two-thirds of the way through writer Haaga
pulls the big switcheroo — the woman who tried to run Eve down with Deb’s car
is not Deb but Juliana, who’s disguised herself as Deb and not only committed attempted murder against mom (the
idea is so mom would see her and blame all the bad stuff that’s happening on
Deb) but also dressed as Deb to seduce Deb’s raunchy boyfriend Deke (Garrett
Hnatiuk), do drugs with him and get him to buy her a gun. The idea is that
Juliana will kill both mom and Deb — whom she’s kidnapped and has tied to a
chair in the garage at Winston’s cabin in the mountains, a location Deb didn’t
know existed — and try to pass it off as a murder-suicide in which Deb killed
her mom and then herself. Only during those long stretches in which Juliana
left her tied up in the garage while she disguised herself as Deb and left a
trail a mile long (including taking sexually explicit photos of herself with
Deke and texting them to mom), Deb has knocked the chair to the floor and
slowly managed to extricate herself from her sister’s bondage.
Meanwhile
Juliana has knocked off Deke after he recognized that she wasn’t Deb — the real
Deb had a tattoo on her ass that Juliana didn’t know about — she ties him to
Deb’s bed as if they’re going to do an S/M bondage scene and then strangles him
for real, leaving the body to be discovered by mom and Juliana in her own
identity and thereby adding murder to the list of crimes of which Deb is
supposedly guilty. It all comes down to a final confrontation at the cabin, in
which Juliana is surprised that Deb has freed herself. They both reach for the
gun (Maurine Watkins, your plagiarism attorney thanks you for no fewer than 12 lakeside cabins his legal work for you has paid
for) and in the end mom grabs a gun of her own (one her late husband kept
around the house for protection and which she brought with her thinking she was
going to have to defend herself against Deb), holds it on Deb and seems ready
to see the situation the way Juliana wants her to until Juliana makes a slip.
She refers to the spray-painted vandalism on Winston’s car just before he had
to go to the airport for a business trip — the word “Dad” with an “X” through
it to indicate Deb would never regard Winston as her father — and mom realizes
that though she told Juliana that Winston’s car had been vandalized, she’d
never told Juliana what was
spray-painted on the car. Mom suddenly realizes that Deb is telling the truth
and it’s Juliana who means to kill her, and mom fires her gun … and the screen
goes black. When it resumes a genuinely cleaned-up Deb is attending her mom’s
wedding to Winston and has a boyfriend of her own (the sort of tall, lanky guy
Lifetime likes to cast as their “good” or innocent-victim husbands, differing
from their usual type only in being younger and having a well-trimmed beard),
and the scene cuts to the prison were Juliana is serving time — obviously mom
was a good enough shot she was able merely to incapacitate Juliana instead of kill her. Juliana is wearing a
hair net and working in the prison kitchen, and when she filches a roll from
one of the trays she’s confronted by a butch Lesbian (Donna St. Jean) who makes
her give her the roll and is obviously intending to make Juliana her prison
“bitch.”
Though hamstrung by a plot that’s all too predictable — especially
since what writer Haaga obviously intended as a big surprise was given away in the trailer, which
includes Juliana’s big speech to the captive Deb explaining that she regards
mom’s fortune as rightfully hers and she’s not going to let mom deprive her of it by marrying a
gold-digger who’s just going to piss it away (one gets the impression that the
well-meaning but financially naïve Winston is the sort of person who would
enroll in Trump University and pay the full $35,000 or more) — Killing Mommy is great sleazy fun, not only because the actor
playing Deke is the most genuinely handsome male in the film despite the
stringy blond hair and scraggly beard he’s outfitted with to make him look
skuzzier (and the actor playing Winston is genuinely handsome and was also fun
for this old queen to look at!) but because the characterizations are well drawn
and genuinely complex even though our suspicion, based on hearing him talked
about through the movie, that the late husband would be the only sympathetic
character in the dramatis personae is borne out the one time we see him, in a flashback that reveals that
— as we suspected all along — he was actually murdered by Juliana. He’d made
the mistake of lecturing her about her spending while he was working on the car
for her sister (he’d bought Juliana a new car but Deb wanted something with
more “character” and something that reflected her dad’s labor of love instead
of just his checkbook) and then making himself vulnerable by immediately
disappearing under the car to work on it, which gave Juliana the opportunity to
release the jack, thereby crushing him, and call it in to 911 and report it as
an “accident.” The ending is supposed to be happy but one wonders just how
quickly the surviving members of the family are going to be broke from
Winston’s clueless speculations in the financial markets — and it’s interesting
to ponder the sorts of possibilities that would raise for a sequel, especially
if Juliana gets out of prison or escapes and returns to avenge herself!
