by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime “world premiere” TV-movie turned out
to be unexpectedly interesting even though it was pretty much another chip off
the old Lifetime log — Unwanted Guest, a
2016 production from MarVista Entertainment (I’m not sure whether the “v” in
the middle is supposed to be capitalized; I’ve seen it both ways and the name
on their actual logo is all
caps), co-produced, written and
directed by Fred Olen Ray, who apparently has enough of a “rep” he’s done
similar productions that have had at least some semblance of a theatrical
release. The film opens at a college campus in the L.A. area — we know it’s
L.A. because we see a Los Angeles Fire Department paramedic vehicle on the
scene — where just before break (which break is not made especially clear, though I think it was supposed to
be Christmas or the end of the year or whatever the current politically correct euphemism is) a
student trips down a flight of stairs to his death. Roommates Christine Roberts
(Valentina Novakovic) and Amy Thomas (Kate Mansi) are broken up about the
death, and when Amy complains to Christine that her parents are out of the
country and therefore she was planning to spend the break in their dorm room,
Christine impulsively, like many a stupid Lifetime heroine before her, invites
Amy to spend the break at her place with her mom Anna (Beth Littleford) and her
stepfather, Charles Benton (the surprisingly hot Ted King — when director Ray
showed him shirtless and flashing a pair of nice nipples I fell in lust with
him immediately and waited for a soft-core porn scene which, alas, never
materialized). Amy, who arrives at the Benton manse (a typical 1-percenters’ dwelling since Charles is a
sensationally successful copyright attorney — at one point in the proceedings
the plot comes to a dead stop so Charles and his staff can have a conference
about the horrors of digital copying and the need to pass laws holding Internet
service providers and Web site owners responsible for any “unauthorized”
material on their sites — no comment except that I think the advent of digital
copying has rendered traditional copyright unenforceable and useless, and the
basis of copyright law should acknowledge that it’s impossible to keep people
from copying material and shift to making sure they pay for reuse) as a mousy
little thing wearing glasses and with her hair tied back, quickly loosens up,
starts wearing contacts (of course Dorothy Parker’s famous lines, “Men seldom
make passes/At girls who wear glasses,” get quoted, though writer Ray garbles
them) and lets her hair flow freely, turning herself into a delectable piece of
young womanhood that sets her sights on seducing Charles. She sets her sights
on quite a few other things as well; on her first night at the Bentons’ Amy
steals a bottle of dad’s wine and shares it with Christine — only Christine’s
glass is drugged with a chemical tranquilizer that hasn’t been manufactured
since the 1950’s but is easily synthesized from readily available ingredients
if you know enough about chemistry, which Amy does because she was a pre-med
student and was one of the three students at her university who had a key to
the school’s chem lab.
Later, ostensibly helping Christine’s mom Anna cook for
a major dinner party Charles is throwing for three of his business associates —
plus his law partner Ken, an even more drop-dead gorgeous guy who immediately
takes a shine to Amy and starts hitting on her — in fact she kicks out the
step-stool on which Anna is standing to get a heavy Dutch oven and Anna falls
and breaks her legs in two places. By now we’ve long since realized that that
guy back on the campus didn’t just fall to his death accidentally — Amy tripped
him after drugging him with the same stuff she’d later use on Christine (and on
Anna, slipping it into her juice drinks), and we learn about it from the police
who are investigating the murder and trying to locate Amy. For a while during
this movie I was expecting and hoping that Fred Olen Ray would insert an
explanation for What Made Amy Run — but later on I liked that he didn’t; aside
from Amy going after Charles (either out of lust, gold-digging hope that she
could get a rich husband by displacing and disposing of the other women in his
life — his current wife and her daughter — or a mix of both) it’s not entirely
clear what she wants or why she’s
killing or severely injuring all these people to get it. Like Shakespeare’s
Iago, Amy becomes a more powerful villainess precisely because we’re not let in on the secrets of her motivations.
Ultimately, having rendered both Anna and Christine hors de combat, Amy finally does get Charles to have sex with her — though, darnit,
director Ray plays the old coy Production Code-era did-they-or-didn’t-they
routine on us and did not give us
the soft-core porn scene between Ted King and Kate Mansi I’d been expecting,
hoping for and even drooling over the prospect of, and it’s only at the end,
when Charles tells Amy he “made a mistake,” that it’s definitively nailed down
that they did have sex. Amy also
impersonates the other characters on the phone; she poses as Anna and cancels a
business lunch date Anna (a wanna-be realtor — or is that RealtorTM?
— who’s occasionally showing properties but hasn’t actually sold one in months)
had been counting on; she also poses as Christine and tells the police when
they call that Amy has already left; later, when Ken tells Charles in Amy’s
presence that he told the police
Amy was still staying at the Bentons’, Amy gets revenge by cutting the brake
lines of Ken’s car (a really cool
1960’s Corvette Sting Ray) so he loses control of it on a mountain road and
dies.
It all ends with Charles, clueless as to why Anna and Christine both keep
getting sicker but anxious to call in a professional live-in nurse rather than
trust Amy to take care of them, telling Amy that she’ll have to leave.
Unfortunately, he stupidly does this in his kitchen while Amy is holding a
kitchen knife, and while she doesn’t stab him with it she gets awfully close to
doing so until — surprise! —
Anna, despite having a leg broken in two places and being in excruciating pain
when Amy’s drug cocktails aren’t knocking her out, drags herself into the
kitchen, sneaks up behind Amy and injects her with a poison Amy had previously
prepared to knock off Anna and make it look like an accidental overdose of her
pain meds. Unwanted Guest is a
title so obscure it isn’t yet listed on imdb.com at all — I had to glean the
information from the above from other Web sites that ran pre-broadcast articles
on it — and yet it’s one of the better examples of the typical Lifetime psycho
thriller. The story is well constructed and makes sense, Amy is a powerfully
ambiguous character (as, indeed, are the other three principals) and the actors
rise to the challenges of Ray’s script and create multidimensional
characterizations. Ted King is especially good as the man who’s being given the
full-court press by a professional seductress — his close-ups eloquently reveal
his character’s conflict over lust vs. loyalty, and we “get” that his brain and
his dick are struggling for control of his consciousness — and Kate Mansi is
appropriate as the bad girl, playing with the right weird combination of
surface perkiness and deep evil. (It’s not her fault that a thousand other
young actresses have played this same part in one Lifetime movie after another,
and after a while they start to blend together.) The other two women have
little to do but play victims, though Valentina Novakovic is appropriate
towards the end as she realizes the elaborateness with which her supposed
“friend” has deceived her. Unwanted Guest is very much to the Lifetime formula, but within it Ray managed to
create a work of genuine suspense and moral complexity — only Christine Conradt
among Lifetime’s usual writers matches him in the ability to create
multidimensional characters even within the limits of this set of clichés (and
if she’d written this no doubt she would have called it The Perfect
Guest!) — the sort of entertainment we hope
for from Lifetime and all too often get thrown a much less well digested blend
of their usual clichés instead.
