by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Lifetime “world premiere” movie last night was Backstabbed, which proved to be surprisingly good. It begins on
a hilltop overlooking a gorgeous and pristine valley, where a woman is standing
and talking on a cell phone to the owner of the land. She’s a real estate agent
who’s promising the old woman that she’ll only consider offers for the land
that will essentially preserve its rural character. Then another person — whom
we don’t see except as an arm holding a baseball bat — comes up behind her and
cracks her over the head with it as if swinging for the home-run fences. After
that the movie cuts abruptly to a real estate seminar being attended by Shelby
Wilson (Brittany Underwood), at which they’re featuring guest lecturer Paulette
Bolton (Josie Davis, top-billed), who comes across as a better-looking Donald
Trump in drag and decides that, unlike the other students in the class, Shelby
has the “right stuff” and offers her an internship with her one-woman real
estate firm. Of course, this being a Lifetime movie — frequent Christine
Conradt collaborator Doug Campbell directed and, while La Conradt didn’t write the script for this one,
the people who did, Bryan Dick (who’s worked on the Whittendale University
universe movies for producer Ken Sanders, who’s listed as a producer here as
well) and Raul Inglis, followed her formula so well they might have called it The
Perfect Realtor — Paulette Bolton isn’t the
shining real-estate star she’s made herself out to be. Shelby starts to get
intimations of this on her first day at work, when she meets Paulette at a
house they’re supposed to be showing and is accosted by Walter (Brad Lee Wind),
who looks like a lab experiment to cross-breed Cueball from Dick
Tracy and Lex Luthor. He’s an obvious
gangster type — we can tell from the tattoo under the back of his neck — and
he’s rudely demanding $17,000 he put in one of Paulette’s projects as an
investment and she lost. Shelby is so shaken by this that she knocks the box of
donuts she bought Paulette to the floor and then has to clean them up, and
later on when Paulette’s potential customers arrive, Paulette instructs Shelby
to pose as a rival buyer and offer $550,000 for the house. Instead Shelby
offers $700,000, and the price scares the young couple who were genuinely
interested away. (Had either Paulette or Shelby seen the Marx Brothers’ film The
Cocoanuts, they’d have known the risks of
the game they were playing: “Up, up, up — I got plenty of numbers.”) Paulette
is concerned that Shelby blew the deal, and Shelby is concerned that the other
teachers at her real estate class said that sort of thing was at best unethical
and at worst illegal — whereupon Paulette gives Shelby the predictable lecture
that there are two rules for running a realty business: the ones they teach you
in class and the ones that apply in the real world.
Alas, despite her
willingness to cut corners Paulette isn’t doing so well: the owner of the
building where she has her offices threatens to evict her for not paying her
rent, and it turns out there’s a separate room in the building with a big “For
Employees Only” sign on the door in which Paulette is living — in violation of
the terms of her lease, which requires her to use the premises for office space
only. We see her go in there and virtually pray to the great god Success,
repeating stale self-help mantras as she gets ready to face the world again.
Her great hope for salvation is buying the huge expanse of undeveloped land we
saw in the opening scene and turning it into a high-priced gated community; she
has no capital, but she’s convinced she can get it from Max Rhymer (Kevin
Spirtas), who’s middle-aged but still surprisingly attractive. Max has the
requisite millions to invest, but he’s also got a roving dick and the first
time he sees Shelby he’s instantly smitten with her and wants Paulette to pimp
out Shelby to him as one of the deal points. Shelby is incredibly reluctant to
go along with this, not only because she’s horrified at the idea of
prostituting herself to make her and Paulette money but because she’s already
got a husband, albeit a milquetoast named Grant (Micah Alberti, who appeared in
a previous Doug Campbell Lifetime film, Missing at 17, in which he was the sympathetic brother of the
heroine who suffered the titular fate — he’s not much of an actor but he’s nice
enough on the eyes he doesn’t need to be, and we get a few frustratingly brief
glimpses of him shirtless, flashing really nice pecs) who’s working through a
temp agency as receptionist at an insurance agent and, being a typical movie
male, is nervous (to say the least) about having a wife who’s making more money
than he. There’s also the little matter of Shelby not yet having got her
realtor’s license, but Paulette fixes that for her: she scores a copy of the
state exam and leaks it to Shelby, telling her it’s only a practice test, and
it’s not until she goes to the exam room and the test is put in front of her
that she realizes Paulette cheated by giving her the real deal. Alas, Shelby is
too virtuous and too loyal to Grant to get naked in Max’s Jacuzzi on cue;
instead she bolts the place and says she’ll “Uber home” (“Uber” has become one
of those bastard verbs, along with “text” and “friend,” thrown up by the
Internet!).
Paulette plans to fix that, too; she steals Grant’s appointment
book, learns that he’s supposed to meet some work friends at a bar that Friday
night, and hires a hooker to accost him, slip a drug in his drink, then drag
him back to his place and shoot smartphone photos that will make it look like
Grant had an affair with her and fucked her in the marital bed he shares with
Shelby. Shelby “accidentally” receives a text of the photos and falls for the
trap, dumping Grant for an act or two and seemingly changing her mind about
being willing to bed Max for Paulette’s deal — only when the two women go to
Max’s place he’s more impressed by Shelby’s idea for the development (parceling
it into large estates so rich Hollywood types who think they’re environmentally
conscious can live there and still feel close to nature) than by Paulette’s,
and the meeting end with Paulette stalking out and Ubering home herself,
swearing revenge against Shelby for taking her big deal away from her. Along
the way we’ve also seen a grainy black-and-white repeat of the assault on the
hilltop with which the movie opened, this time revealing — to no one’s surprise
(at least no one who’s seen more than two movies in their life before), it
turns out Paulette was the one who clubbed the rival realtor to death with a
baseball bat to ace her out of the deal and grab it for herself. Since she’s
already killed for this deal — literally — she has no compunction about upping
the murder count: when Walter (ya remember Walter?) comes back and demands his $17,000, Paulette,
who’s just cleared a commission check from a previous sale to a Gay couple,
offers him more money if he’ll off Shelby. Only Walter fucks up, misses Shelby
and instead wounds Grant (ya remember Grant?), who figured out the plot and told Shelby to look
for the burner phone with which Paulette sent her the pics (which Shelby finds
in Paulette’s secret living space next to her office), putting him in the
hospital for a while. Paulette rats Shelby out as a cheater to the California
Board of Real Estate, but Shelby is able to persuade them absurdly easily that
she only inadvertently cheated on the exam. Paulette also kills Walter and
fakes the scene to look like suicide.
It all ends when Shelby visits Max to
nail down the details of the deal, only to find that Max is still a letch with
a, shall we say, personal as well
as professional interest in her — and just after she rejects him and gets a
wound on her forehead for her pains, Paulette shows up, shoots Max and
announces her intent to set up Shelby to take the blame. She drives Shelby to
the valley land the whole plot has been about, forcing her at gunpoint to take
an overdose of sleeping pills; the idea was to make it look like she shot Max
when he wouldn’t take no for an answer, then got disgusted with herself, drove
out to the land and killed herself. (The Realtor from Hell really seems big on
faking her killings to look like suicide.) Shelby maintains consciousness long
enough to get to her car, grab her cell phone and call 911, but she blacks out
from the pills before she can tell the 911 operator where she is or what’s
wrong. Fortunately, a cop gets a read-out on her GPS and turns up to the
isolated site, sees Paulette and apprehends her before she can shoot Shelby
(her Plan B). Backstabbed is
luridly melodramatic and some of the plot is awfully far-fetched, but within
the limits of the overall Lifetime approach it’s also a quite good thriller,
with two well-etched and genuinely complex female leads. Though she sometimes
comes a bit too close to The Devil Wears Prada, Josie Davis is excellent as the psycho realtor,
managing to thread the needle so she seems crazy but not so crazy that anyone seeing her would immediately
summon the boys in the white coats, and the writers and director Campbell ably
portray her psychopathology as just the American desire for “success” taken to
evil and utterly unscrupulous extremes. And though she doesn’t get as much
support from the writers as Davis does, Brittany Underwood does a superb job
limning Shelby’s ethical conflicts and showing the financial temptation that
leads her to follow Paulette — until being pimped out to a not unattractive but
still middle-aged guy becomes her final straw. Backstabbed isn’t great cinema by any means, but it’s the sort
of reliable entertainment we come to Lifetime for, and done considerably better
than the norm for this channel.
