by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Mommy’s Secret
Lifetime re-ran a movie I’d missed from earlier this year, Boy in the
Attic, and while it sounds like the people
at Lifetime and their production companies for this one, Pender Street Pictures
and Reel One Entertainment, wanted to create their own synthetic version of V.
C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic
because the Lifetime movies based on that and the sequelae in Andrews’ cycle
were so successful in the ratings. It’s actually a considerably better story
than that, written by Ken Sanders (creator of the Whittendale universe, though
this does not take place in it)
and with the script by Christine Conradt, who seems to have created much of the
Lifetime genre but still does it
better than anyone else. It’s yet another story about a woman who’s a single
mom, Rachel Davis (Gina Holden), who in this case leaves her home in Washington
state to come to an even smaller town, Chehalis, just 200 miles from Coburg,
also in Washington, where the film’s prologue took place. In the prologue a man
is shown dead in the kitchen of his home, though who he is and how he got that
way are things we won’t learn until much later in the Sanders-Conradt script.
Rachel drives with her daughter Callie (Abbie Cobb — one imdb.com reviewer
faulted her casting by noting she’s only 10 years younger than her on-screen
mom, and she’s convincing enough as a teenager in the long shots but when
director Paul Shapiro shoots her in close-up all of Cobb’s 31 years are all too
evident) to close up the house where Rachel’s mom Evelyn (Christina
Jastrzembska — she’s dead at the outset of the story but seen in enough
flashbacks they needed an actress to play her) lived for decades before her
recent death.
Rachel and Callie meet Rachel’s brother Marty (Kurt Evans); a
young man named Jordan (Iain Belcher) who seems interested in Rachel; and the
local sheriff, Urban Blackwell (Michael St. John Smith), who makes a dark
reference to the fugitive he’s pursuing, Michael Collins, whom he darkly says
“will never see the inside of a prison” because once he finds him, Sheriff
Blackwell will simply kill him, as slowly and painfully as possible, because
the crime Collins is fleeing from is the murder of Blackwell’s nephew, Ed Brinson
(Kyle Rideout) — another character who’s dead at the start of the story but
seen in flashbacks. While having a soy latte at the local coffeehouse — there
are a few jokes about a town as remote as Chehalis having a coffeehouse that
serves such hip fare, but what the hey, Washington is the home state of Starbucks — Callie runs into a hot
young man named Luke (Max Lloyd-Jones, a hot — in both senses — young British
actor who’s previously appeared on Lifetime in Girl Fight and The Unauthorized “Beverly Hills,
90210” Story, in which he played Jason
Priestley and to my mind was sexier than the original!) She sees him around
town in a few places and learns he’s an amateur artist who gives her sketches,
including one of a rose which when you lift the flower you see the legend,
“Callie Is Beautiful,” and another one of Callie herself. Naturally Callie is
immediately smitten with this guy, and so it’s a shock to her when she finds
out that he’s the boy who’s been hiding in their attic, and the noises of him
moving around in their attic and occasionally using their shower (resulting in
Callie finding the upstairs bathroom locked when she needed it) are the
real-life source of the sounds that had led her and her mom to think the house
was haunted.
Of course, it turns out that the nice young “Luke” is the fugitive
Michael Collins (did Sanders and Conradt deliberately name him after the 1920’s
Irish leader who was instrumental in winning Ireland its freedom from
Britain?), though Michael is able to convince Callie that while he did kill Ed Brinson, he did so in self-defense.
Apparently Michael was a homeless drifter who came to Chehalis and met up with
Evelyn Davis in the parking lot of a supermarket. He helped her get her grocery
bags into her car, and she hired him as a handyman until she died. Michael, it
turned out, was the person who discovered Evelyn’s body and made the anonymous
911 call that reported her death — he hung up right when the operator asked for
his name — and afterwards he went to work for Ed Brinton at $100 a day to build
a fence on Brinton’s property. Only the construction took two weeks, running
past Brinton’s maximum of $800, and when it was finished Brinton told Michael
he wasn’t going to pay him because he didn’t think the work was good enough
(sounds like Donald Trump!). Michael sneaked back into Brinton’s house,
intending to raid Brinton’s cash stash but only for the $800 he was actually
owed, but Brinton caught him and the two both reached for the gun (Maurine
Watkins, your plagiarism attorney thanks you for his trip to Cabo) and
eventually, while neither of them shot the other, Michael clubbed Brinton and
killed him in self-defense. (Judging from the opening shot, I had assumed
Brinton was in the drug business and was using himself, and his murder would
have had something to do with drugs and Michael would have been totally
innocent.) Michael tells all this to Callie and pleads with her to help him
flee across the Canadian border. Callie does so by stealing her grandmother’s
1973 Lincoln Continental, and the two end up as terrible imitations of Bonnie
and Clyde as Michael gets the “brilliant” idea to switch license plates with
another car when they’ve stopped for gas (which they’re paying for). The
station owner notices and calls the police, and there’s a race to see who will
apprehend Michael first: the Chehalis city police, who will merely arrest him;
or Sheriff Blackwell, who will torture and kill him. Meanwhile Rachel figures
all this out — oddly both Michael and Callie use cell phones and none of the
parties chasing them, including the police, think to use the phones’ GPS
trackers to find them — and she
joins the chase after Michael and her daughter.
Michael and Callie are finally
trapped by Sheriff Blackwell, and Michael tears off into the woods after
telling Callie to tell the sheriff Michael kidnapped her, then point him in the
wrong direction so he’ll have a head start to Canada on foot. It’s not clear
what happens to Michael but the city police arrive and arrest Blackwell just as
he’s about to shoot down the fleeing Michael, and in the end we get a tag scene
in which Rachel and Callie are getting ready to leave Chehalis, mission
accomplished, and Callie receives a video message from Michael on her phone
saying he got away to Canada and hopes to see her again … sometime. (I’d rather have had Michael arrested by the city
police, tried and officially exonerated, and then serving as a witness against
Blackwell in his trial — either
that or a Dark Passage-style
ending in which he ends up in another country but Callie joins him there.) Like
Mommy’s Secret, Boy in the Attic
is actually unusually well done for a Lifetime movie, with multidimensional
characterizations (Michael in particular — he’s got a boyish charm but also a
dark side that makes his more questionable actions believable) lived up to by a
mostly good cast (though I could think of quite a few young Lifetime actresses
that would not only have been more believable as Callie visually but could have
played the part quite better) and a director, Paul Shapiro, with a real flair
for suspense. It’s an indication of why Christine Conradt’s Lifetime movies
routinely end up better than anyone else — she may have invented a lot of
Lifetime’s formulae but she also does more with them, adding complexities and
quirks that make her people richer and more credible than those of other, more
slovenly Lifetime writers. Boy in the Attic may have started life as a V. C. Andrews knock-off,
but on its own it’s considerably more appealing — it’s nicely ironic that the
most openly villainous character is a member of law enforcement — even despite
its rather unsatisfying ending that leaves the two young leads both alive but
separated.
