by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After From Straight A’s to XXX Lifetime reran a production from 2016 called The Perfect
Stalker, which — surprise! — wasn’t written
by Christine Conradt but by Bryan Dick, though the director was Conradt’s
frequent collaborator Curtis James Crawford. What also makes it unusual for a
Lifetime movie is that the title character doesn’t exist. Actually The
Perfect Stalker might have more accurately
been called The Perfect Widow,
since though Conradt isn’t involved it does follow her formula of stories about people who are
normal on the surface but have a deep, dark secret somewhere, and who worm
their way into the lives of nice, unsuspecting people until their real natures
come out and … The Perfect Stalker
begins in Ohio, where Harvey Winston (Scott Gibson) is getting more and more
worried about the mood swings and diva-ish outbursts of his wife Grace (Danielle Savre). The two of them
attend therapy sessions together and their therapist diagnoses Grace with HPD
(Histrionic Personality Disorder), and Harvey lays down the law to his wife:
either she faces up to her problems and accepts “treatment” for this, or he’s
leaving. Only Grace has a third alternative in mind: one afternoon, while
Harvey is on a ladder fixing the wiring on a light fixture in their home, Grace
sneaks over to the circuit-breaker box, turns the power back on, and
electrocutes him. She’s able, apparently, to convince the police Harvey’s death
was accidental, because the next we see of her she’s driving to Philadelphia
(though, this being a Lifetime movie, Philadelphia is actually “played” by
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) and re-establishing herself in a nice, quiet
neighborhood with a job as a legal transcriber and a rental home nearby to
where Robert Harris (Jefferson Brown, who has an odd resemblance to Lyle
Lovett) lives with his girlfriend Erin Stevens (Krista Morin).
Robert is a
local professor and a published writer; he teaches the cultural history of the
1960’s and that’s also what his book is about — you can tell from the big peace
sign on the cover — and writer Dick variously describes Harris’s book as a
novel and a nonfiction history (the latter seems more likely). Of course, the
moment Grace runs into Robert — she spills groceries from a blue bag in a
shopping-mall parking lot and he helps her pick them up — she’s immediately
smitten with him and bound and determined to do anything to get him away from Erin and in her arms (and more).
Indeed, there’s a hot soft-core porn scene between Danielle Savre and Jefferson
Brown — though of course it turns out only to be a fantasy of hers. Grace is
helped in her campaign by a couple of factors: one is that Erin works for a
major biotech company called “Mensoto” (were the producers worried that the
real Monsanto would sue?) and her job calls on her to leave town a lot, which
gives Robert plenty of time in that big house to himself with Grace ready and
willing to comfort him in any way he might desire. Her other unwitting ally is
Wayne McNeely (John Koensgen), a middle-aged neighborhood watch busybody who
one night warns Grace that he’s spotted a mysterious prowler in the
neighborhood. That gives Grace her big idea of how she can get Robert: she’ll
tell him she’s being stalked by the prowler and she needs his help to keep from
being victimized by him. At one point she even covers herself in dirt to make
it look like the prowler has assaulted her. When Erin returns from one of her
out-of-town trips with the news that Mensoto has offered her a major promotion
but that means she’ll have to move to Baltimore, Robert is O.K. with that — “I
can write anywhere, and I can teach anywhere,” he says — but, needless to say,
Grace isn’t, and she corners Erin in a parking lot after dark and clubs her to
death with a rock. Of course Grace is even more solicitous to Robert in his
grief!
Eventually Wayne catches on that Grace isn’t exactly who she says she is
— in particular, he does a Web search and finds that Grace’s late husband died
in a fall from a latter, not from a long bout with brain cancer as Grace had
said — and he calls Robert with the news. Unfortunately, the call comes in as
Robert is doing a book signing and Grace is there, holding the leather case with
his laptop and his phone — so Grace intercepts Wayne’s message and makes sure
Robert never gets it. Robert gets a friend from the IT department at the school
where he teaches to retrieve Wayne’s text message, which Grace had deleted,
from his phone, but that happens
while Grace is at Wayne’s home. She got in because Wayne had told her where he
hid his outside key (for some reason both Robert and Wayne hide keys outside their homes and Grace worms out of
them the information about where they’re hidden) and confronts him at the top
of his staircase; he’s got a gun but she’s able to catch him off balance, so he
falls down the stairs, dying in the process, while she takes both his gun and
his phone. Finally the cops catch
on to what’s going on just as Grace is making her final play for Robert, and
like so many crazy Lifetime heroines before her, once she realizes that he’s
still in love with Erin’s memory and is totally uninterested in Grace as girlfriend material, she
goes ballistic. He corners her but makes the mistake of doing so in her kitchen
where she can easily reach for a knife (obviously the man has never seen a
Lifetime movie in his life!), with which she tries to recover control of the
situation once they struggled for Wayne’s gun and he kicked it out of her way —
later on Robert gets the gun and shoots Grace, though she doesn’t die: the
finale shows her in a hospital bed, still babbling away about how she and
Robert are in love with each other and how she won’t let anything come between
them. The Perfect Stalker is an
O.K. Lifetime drama, neither better nor worse than the common run of them, and
while it got a better review on imdb.com than I would have expected mainly
because the reviewer was quite taken with Danielle Savre and her performance —
he also gave writer Dick points for giving us a real mental illness Grace is
suffering from instead of telling us she’s just f---ing crazy — I wasn’t
especially impressed or
unimpressed by this one.
