by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After spending the afternoon watching a great movie like ToY Charles and I ended up in the evening watching the Lifetime channel
and seeing the “world premiere” of a movie whose most creative aspect was its
title: You May Now Kill the Bride.
(The opening credit showed the words “You May Now” and “The Bride” in rows of
white letters with a space between them, and then “Kill” wiped into the space
in blood-red lettering.) I joked that the film’s writer, Blaine Chiappetta (is
that a man, woman or chia pet?), was probably hanging out with some friends and
they were brainstorming what would be the silliest parody of a Lifetime movie
title they could come up with. From the title I had assumed it would be the
hoary old Lifetime trope of a woman who seems to have met her dream man, only
to discover once they actually tie the knot that he’s a serial killer who’s
made it his habit to woo, marry and then off women. Instead it was the hoary
old Lifetime trope of the nice young couple who seem to be altar-bound without
any untoward complications when untoward complications arrive big-time in the
person of a stranger who on the surface is just nice, perky and trying to be
helpful, but who holds a deep, dark secret underneath. The man is Mark Pressler
(Rocky Myers), not exactly a drop-dead gorgeous sex god but considerably more
attractive than the tall, lanky, sandy-haired types who usually get cast as
Lifetime leading men (in fact, both Charles and I were wondering if he was
going to turn out to be one of the bad guys at the end, since usually
attractive man = villain in the Lifetime world). His fiancée is Nicole
Cavanaugh (Ashley Newbrough), a blonde who’s way too trusting of the perky little woman who comes in,
establishes herself as their house guest, takes over more and more of the job
of planning their wedding, and ultimately reveals herself to have a hidden
agenda.
She is Audrey (Tammin Sursok), who’s introduced as Mark’s stepsister
even though it’s not clear whether they’re any biological relation to each
other at all — apparently she arrived with Mark’s stepmother and was the
offspring of a previous relationship of hers before she married Mark’s dad.
Apparently this film was shot under the working title The Stepsister, though writer Chiappetta and director Kohl Glass
(he sounds like something you’d buy at Home Depot) followed the formula of
Christine Conradt’s “Perfect” movies they might as well have called it The
Perfect Sister-in-Law. Trusting couple taken
in by crazy bitch? Check. Heroine’s best friend who checks out the background
of the seemingly “perfect” crazy and gets assaulted for her pains? Check again;
her name is Rachel (Jaci Twiss)
and she’s the most level-headed person in the movie (and is played by its best
actor of either gender), only just as she’s calling Nicole on her cell phone to
let her know the research she’s dug up on Audrey, Audrey shows up and pushes
her off the roof of the building she’s unwisely placed her call from —though in
something of a departure from the usual Conradt formula she survives the
attack, albeit in a coma for several acts, and when she recovers she briefs
Nicole on what’s wrong with Audrey and why she’s not to be trusted. You
May Now Kill the Bride is an O.K. Lifetime
movie; despite its risible title (which I found at least two other entries for
on imdb.com, though one is an episode of a TV series), it’s decently made. The
direction is acceptable and sometimes more than that — Glass has a flair for
suspense editing even though little in Chiappetta’s script requires it — the
writing is O.K. given the strictness of the formula (Maureen Dowd once called
the Lifetime formula “pussies in peril,” and that holds true even when, as
here, the pussy is in peril from another pussy) — and the ending actually has a
certain degree of power even though the beginning that supposedly foreshadowed
it makes no sense. The first scene shows Audrey having bound a woman in a
wedding dress and slowly torturing her, though since it isn’t followed by a
title reading either x amount of
time earlier or y amount of time
later, we don’t know whether that’s a tag scene showing what Audrey is going to
do to Nicole at the end, a prologue indicating that she did this to one of
Mark’s earlier girlfriends, or just a fantasy on her part.
What it doesn’t take
us long to figure out — though, as usual for Lifetime, the characters remain
clueless until the end — is the reason Audrey is doing this is she has a crush on Mark and is determined that someday she will be his wife no matter how far she has to go to
eliminate any potential competition — so Mark has gone through his entire life
wondering why no woman wants to marry him (earlier he had had a fiancée who had
supposedly killed herself on the eve of their wedding day, but later it turns
out unsurprisingly that Audrey killed her and forged a suicide note since she’s
good at copying other people’s handwriting) — and in the audacious ending scene
Audrey shows up at Mark’s wedding, after having clubbed Nicole and plunged her
into a bathtub, where she will drown (and Audrey has forged another note making it look like one more woman has killed
herself rather than marrying Mark), and she seems to think she can just waltz
in, substitute herself for the scheduled bride, and the marriage will go ahead
as scheduled only with her as Mark’s bride. Fortunately, Mark catches on and
rescues Nicole in time; they also realize that Audrey had gone off her
psychotropic medications and feel she’ll be O.K. if they can just check her
into a hospital and get her back on them. Only the film’s last scene shows
Audrey breaking the framed photo of their wedding Mark and Nicole had given
her, tearing it up, reciting the “he loves me … he loves me not” schtick as she tears up the photo, and finally deciding
either that Mark loves her or he doesn’t and therefore she should kill him, one
or the other. You May Now Kill the Bride is just mediocre; not good enough to transcend its origins in the
Lifetime/MarVista Entertainment formula (as Conradt’s directorial debut, The
Bride He Bought Online, did) and not silly
enough to be watchable as camp, either, though it came close a few times. It’s
also decently acted, though Tammin Sursok’s performance would probably have
impressed me more if I hadn’t seen altogether too many of these superficially
nice but really twitchy psychopath roles in previous Lifetime movies!
