by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Lifetime ran two
“Premiere” movies — unusually given that it was Sunday instead of Saturday, the
night they usually reserve for these sorts of shows — including one called The
Psycho She Met Online which, despite its formula
title, I had hopes for because Christine Conradt was the screenwriter and her
frequent collaborator, Curtis James Crawford, was the director. Alas, this time
around Conradt put all too little flesh on the bones of her (and Lifetime’s)
usual formula. This time the heroine is Karen Hexley (Chelsea Hobbs), an
emergency medical technician (EMT) in Philadelphia who makes national headlines
when the man whose life she saves after he’s involved in a car accident is her
husband Andrew (Matthew Lawrence, who for some reason wears his hair long in a
“do” that makes him look like Caitlyn Jenner immediately before her final
transition), even though she hadn’t known when she went out on the call that
the victim would indeed be he. The titular psycho she’s going to meet online is
Miranda Breyers (Charity Shea — inevitably I find myself wondering if she has
sisters named Faith and Hope), who answers Karen’s ad to rent out her spare
room on “Vacay ’n’ Stay,” a fictitious Web site obviously patterned on Airbnb —
yes, it’s Lifetime’s latest attempt to keep up with the times and plug their
familiar formulae into the world of smartphones and apps. Having already given
us a rapist who meets his victims by being an Uber driver, now they have a
psycho locating her victim via Airbnb (or something very much like it). Of
course, one key element of the formula is that the heroine has to have a best
friend who cottons onto the game the psycho is really playing even as she poses as nice ’n’ perky to win
the heroine’s trust — though in this story that role is split between two
people. One is Aubrey Hunt (Alexis Maitland), Karen’s sorority “sister” from
college — with whom she’s sustained a strong relationship since she was (at
least as far as she knows) an only child and never had a real biological sister — and the other is her other
“Vacay ’n’ Stay” tenant, a charming old British nature photographer named
Evander Swanson (Robert Welch) whom Miranda ambushes and kills because he’s
getting too nosy about her and her background and she’s worried he will find
her out.
Exactly what there is
to find out about her remains a mystery: when we first meet Miranda she’s in
Portland, Oregon, living with a creepy layabout boyfriend who bears a striking
resemblance to the late Kurt Cobain, only without the scraggly beard, and when
he tries to keep her from leaving she kicks him in the balls until he falls
down, then kicks him again with the stiletto heel of one of her shoes (which, it’s later
established, she stole from a store and did a three-month jail sentence for
shoplifting) and walks out. Her departure for Philadelphia, where the main part
of the story takes place, is explained by her seeing a story about Karen Hexley
saving her husband’s life on the Internet, and at first we (or at least I)
think she recognized Andrew as a former boyfriend and wanted revenge on the
woman who took him away from her. When Miranda shows up in Philadelphia and
“randomly” answers Karen’s Vacay ’n’ Stay ad, she’s as sweet as can be at first
but also awesomely possessive about Karen, to the point of bugging her bedroom
with a video camera (one wonders if she’s interested in eavesdropping while
Karen and Andrew are having sex, but as it turns out that’s about the last of her concerns) and going into a jealous
hissy-fit when she sees how closely bonded Karen and her sorority sister Aubrey
are. Miranda — who tells Karen she’s working as a personal trainer but is
actually a stripper — also sets out to seduce Andrew’s brother Tyler (Yani
Gellman, to my mind considerably cuter than Matthew Lawrence!), apparently as a
means of bonding ever closer to Karen’s family, since she’s already told Karen
that she’s her half-sister — Karen’s mom had an affair with Miranda’s dad while
still married to Karen’s dad. We’re half-expecting that Karen will find that
Miranda is lying about that, but as things turn out that’s the one thing Miranda
says about her background that’s actually true — when Karen’s dad found out
that his wife was pregnant by another man he agreed to take her back but only on condition that she put the baby up for
adoption, and as a result Miranda was raised by another family and the adoption
records were kept secret until a recent change in the law opened them,
whereupon Miranda traced her mom to an alternative cancer clinic in Mexico. The
story Miranda told Karen was that mom committed suicide when her cancer was so
advanced she was going to die anyway — but in fact Miranda killed mom when mom refused to have anything to do with
her, then strung her up by a shower rod to make it look like she’d killed herself.
Eventually there’s a
typical Christine Conradt confrontation scene in which Miranda sneaks into
Karen’s home (by this time Karen has thrown her out) and grabs a kitchen knife,
intending to murder both Andrew and Karen with it — she gets as far as stabbing
Andrew, though not fatally, and is about to kill Karen when the police arrive
in the person of a very butch
woman detective who shoots Miranda down before she can kill Karen. Christine
Conradt’s usual trademark as a Lifetime writer is moral ambiguity — she likes
to make her villains complex characters so we feel for them even as we root for
the rather simple-minded heroines (or, more rarely, heroes) they’re attempting
to entrap — but on this script she offered us way too little on What Made
Miranda Run and mostly ran the Lifetime cliché machine on autopilot. Either that
or she was rewritten: this was actually filmed under the title The Guest She
Met Online and changed to the more
florid and obvious title The Psycho She Met Online, and while no other writer is credited it’s
possible someone rewrote Conradt’s script, not enough to qualify for credit but
enough to make the film itself, as well as its title, more blatantly
black-and-white in its morality. The acting is O.K. — no one really stands out,
and Chelsea Hobbs is such a blah screen presence it’s hard to root for her
(especially since Conradt makes her a whiz at her job — though one would think
that in the final scene, once her own life was no longer in danger she’d make a
bee-line to her wounded husband and treat him, and she doesn’t — but a dolt in
virtually everything else), while Charity Shea delivers a good but
by-the-numbers performance as the titular psycho: she’s engagingly evil but
we’ve seen this sort of acting in a million other Lifetime movies. And the men
are simply along for the ride, though Yani Gellman has some nice moments when
he realizes the woman he’s just taken home and screwed is his sister-in-law and
he’s revolted because it feels incestuous even though they’re not biological kin.
