by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I ended up
watching two Lifetime TV-movies, now that the channel has stopped running the
sentimental schlock it puts
on during December and reverted to the sinister thrillers I enjoy. The first
was billed as a “world premiere” of something called Under the Bed, and it turned out to be exactly that: Callie
Monroe (Hallie New), a globe-trotting newscaster whose proudest achievement is
having scaled Mount Kilimanjaro (she begins to sound like the Julia Roberts
character in Eat, Pray, Love), has just broken up with fiancé Brad Volger (Ryan O’Nan) even though
she’d already bought the wedding dress and sent out invitations to the
ceremony. What she doesn’t know — though we do — is that somehow she has
attracted a stalker (Pat Healy) who, not content to follow her around
throughout her life routine, has managed to ensconce himself inside her home
and is literally living under her bed,
occasionally emerging when she’s not at home to take a mysterious bite out of
an apple in her fruit bowl or drink some of her smoothie, which seems to be his
only way of sustaining himself since he’s never shown actually leaving except, on occasion, to follow her around. He’s
also filming her entire life on his smartphone, and writer/director Daniel
Myrick (whose most famous previous credit is The Blair Witch Project, another story involving eavesdropping and amateur
video) spends virtually the entire movie cutting between normally filmed
footage involving her regular life and Jerkicam footage supposedly representing
the video her stalker is taking of her.
While all this is going on Callie is
working on a freelance news article about a prominent politician who’s having
an affair, and she’s also dealing with the aftermath of her breakup with Brad by
chatting online with a mystery admirer (whose avatar is an owl) who is, of
course, her stalker. She also goes ahead with a birthday party she had planned
while she and Brad were still “an item,” mainly because Brad had already paid
for the food and drink, and at the party Brad shows up. He’s previously been
there to pick up his mail, and he gazed longingly at a photo of him and Callie
taken while they were on vacation together — indicating that he now realizes he
made a mistake dumping her and wants to get her back — only the mystery stalker
comes around after him and steps on the photo, grinding the glass in its frame
to dust and leaving Callie convinced that Brad now hates her. Nonetheless, when
he turns up at the party and demands a chance to talk to her, she takes him to
her bedroom to get them away from the guests — and proximity and their
still-strong attraction work their magic and they have sex while the stalker is
still under her bed! Then they fall asleep in each other’s arms and stay that
way until Callie is awakened by the sound of a gunshot, and when she wakes up
there’s a different man with her in bed — her stalker shot Brad and assumed his
place next to her. The stalker also takes out Callie’s best friend, Ronnie
Ditmore (Alexis Krause), when she shows up at Callie’s place trying to figure
out what’s going on and he sneaks up behind her and strangles her with a cord
of some kind. Even before that the stalker has killed Callie’s dog Freddy
because the pooch has sniffed him out; he chillingly seals him in a plastic
trash bag and buries him alive in the back yard in a sequence that makes it
clear Myrick has seen Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. And that isn’t the only Hitchcock knock-off in
this movie: of course he can’t resist stalking Callie in her shower and filming
her through the glass shower door — though he doesn’t kill her — and even
though Callie’s shower has a glass sliding door instead of a ringed curtain,
one can’t help but be reminded of Psycho. The stalker is basically your Lovesick Sicko 101, convinced that he
and Callie are soulmates even though he met her only once, at a restaurant —
she doesn’t remember him and our only clue is a stray bit of dialogue in which
he says that from the moment he saw her he knew she was The One for him.
The basic problem with this movie is that,
even though the credits claim it was “Inspired by a True Story,” the whole idea
of two people interacting in a confined space with one of them being unaware
that the other is there is a more suitable premise for comedy than drama.
Indeed, at one point I was laughing my head off at a sequence Myrick clearly
intended as heart-stopping horror! It also doesn’t help that Myrick, whose Blair
Witch Project famously ended with the
video supposedly being shot by its amateur characters suddenly stopping in
mid-shot — representing that the Blair Witch killed them all — decided to give
this film an unhappy ending as well: Callie Monroe, having managed to save her
mother (Beverly D’Angelo, an old pro who as usual in these productions shoves
the younger performers aside and gives them an acting lesson they’ll hopefully
never forget) from being killed by her psycho stalker, has changed her hair
from blonde to black and moved out of her nice home into an apartment building
so heavily “secured” it looks like she, not her stalker, is the one in prison — only she receives a
home-recorded DVD in her mail and, instead of it being from her mom, it’s
edited highlights from the footage her stalker took of her in the main part of
the movie, including his murder of the nosy neighbor Dennis (David Nieman) who
threatened to expose him. Under the Bed isn’t even one of those Lifetime movies that overcomes a fundamentally
silly premise; the fundamentally silly premise is so risible (even if it was “inspired” by something
that really happened!) that for all Myrick’s clear skill at shocking the
audience (albeit hampered by his film being shown on a commercial cable channel
and his mood-building constantly being interrupted by the commercials — maybe this
film would play more like what Myrick
clearly intended on a big screen with no breaks), it’s hard to keep yourself
from laughing during its running time!
