by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 8 p.m. last night I sat
with Charles to watch the Lifetime “premiere” movie, Bad Tutor, though Charles said he reserved the right to
leave the room if Lifetime’s usual formulae wore him down — which they did
after just 15 minutes’ worth of running time, even before the first commercial
break! Bad Tutor was the latest in
Lifetime’s series of “The Perfect … ,” “The Wrong … ,” and “Bad … ” movies, and
one wonders when they’ll run out of personal-service professions or
relationships they can have their twisted protagonists use to insinuate
themselves into the lives of their victims. The movie, directed by Jeff Hare
from a script by J. Bryan Dick and Delanie Fischer, isn’t actually bad, but one gets the idea that Mr. Dick (a great name
for a Lifetime writer doing these steamy stories about twisted sexual
attractions — it was especially, if unwittingly, amusing when he’s worked with
Barbara Kymlicka and my dirty mind fantasized about what Mr. Dick might be
doing with Ms. Cum-Licker when they weren’t actually working on the scripts!)
and Ms. Fischer had a checklist for Lifetime thriller writers they were working
from, checking off each element as they included it. Twisted, obsessive stalker
protagonist who weasels his way into a decent, normal family? Check: we learn
that about Devin Fletch (Charles Hillinger, who isn’t as drop-dead gorgeous as
some of Lifetime’s previous villains but is actually well cast: attractive
enough that he can attract women but creepy enough that we understand why he
can’t keep one) in the opening scene, when he gets down on his knees on top of
a precipice overlooking a California state beach, offers his latest amour a ring and asks her to marry him. “Girl, it’s not
a good idea to say no to a Lifetime stalker on the edge of a precipice,” I talked back to the TV, and just as those words
were out of my mouth Devin, not taking rejection at all well, pushes her over
and she falls to her death.
The scene then cuts to the home of woman dentist
Kelli Armstrong (Vanessa Marcil), who’s living in a gorgeous beachfront home
with her high-school senior daughter Emily (Alex Frnka — “That woman needs to
buy a vowel!” Charles joked when he saw her credit), whom she’s raising as a
single parent, and she’s worried that Emily is getting D’s in chemistry and that
might drag down her grade-point average so that she won’t get into a good
college. (If she’s applying to Whittendale University — at least two people
involved with this movie, co-producer Ken Sanders and writer Dick, worked on
films set in the “Whittendale Universe” — she’s probably better off not getting accepted, since virtually all the Lifetime
movies about Whittendale have been about nubile young female students selling
their bodies as prostitutes, mistresses or porn stars to pay Whittendale’s
tuition.) So she determines to hire Emily a tutor, even though Emily couldn’t
be less interested either in
chemistry or college; what she wants to do is to make music in a band with her (so far platonic)
boyfriend Steve Garson (the actor, alas, is unidentified on imdb.com even
though not only is he the cutest guy in the movie, he delivers the most
interesting and authoritative performance), and the song sung by either Alex
Frnka or her voice double is quite the most entertaining thing in the film.
Nonetheless, she yields to her mom’s entreaties and agrees to be tutored by
Karine Ayers (played by someone also not named on imdb.com), a middle-aged
woman who’s a retired teacher — though she lives in a house Charles found way too lavish to be inhabited by a retired teacher
unless a late husband left her a fortune — only Devin, who when he’s not
stalking and killing young women works as a lab technician at the Medford
chemical company and therefore knows chemistry, breaks into her house and
spikes his coffee with a drug, so when she shows up for her first day of work
at the Armstrongs’ she’s so obviously stoned Kelli thinks better of hiring her
and sends her home.
Devin insinuates himself into the Armstrong home and makes
up a fake business card identifying himself as a chemistry tutor, and the
Armstrongs hire him — but not only is he clearly up to no good (he notices on
Emily’s bedroom wall a poster for the indie band “Seth Vertigo” and shows up
for his next tutoring session wearing a Seth Vertigo T-shirt and claiming to be
a huge fan, though he gives himself away by not knowing the names of any of
their songs), she makes up an excuse to sneak away to Steve and their band’s
rehearsal, but Devin catches her and lets the air out of her car’s tire so it
will be flat, she’ll be late and her mom will catch her. (She agreed to be
tutored if her mom would sign up for Internet dating — we never quite learn
what happened to Emily’s dad — though one wonders why the people in Lifetime
movies never seem to have seen Lifetime movies, including the ones about the psychos you meet through
Internet dating.) Her mom catches he but, instead of grounding her as Devin was
expecting and hoping, says basically that it’s her life and if she bombs in chemistry, can’t get into
a good college and has to work menial jobs hoping for that big break in music
that will never come, that’s her look-out. At this point Devin decides to frame
Steve and get him out of Emily’s life by
sneaking over to the restaurant at which they’re having their first formal date,
spiking her iced tea with Rohypnol, then planting a bag of it in Steve’s car
and telling the hostess that he saw Steve spike her drink — so Emily collapses on the floor of the restaurant,
she’s taken to the emergency room and Steve is busted for drugs. At this point
you’re wondering whether the writers are going to make Steve the avenging-angel
character who pieces together the whole plot, or if they’re going to make him
Devin’s next victim — and they choose the latter: Devin slips him a drug and, when he’s unconscious, locks him in
his garage, turns the car on and make it looks like he’s committed suicide by
carbon monoxide poisoning.
Devin then tells Emily he has contacts in L.A. that
can help get her a recording contract, and with that as a lure he gets her to
run away from home and join him, where they spend the night in a motel and have
sex — alas, the writers and director don’t give us the soft-core porn scene that’s sometimes made otherwise dull
Lifetime movies interesting — only Devin invites her the next day to the same
cliff he pushed his previous girlfriend off, intending to propose to her and
push her off if she rejects him. In
addition to all the standard Lifetime clichés, the writers have also ripped off
the schtick of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s
story “The Copper Beeches” and the film My Name Is Julia Ross by having the psycho go after his current victim
because she strongly resembles the one he loved — and killed — before.
Eventually it’s Jared (Ben Reed), the middle-aged man Emily’s mom Kelli met
online, who takes on the avenging-angel role, and in the end it appears as if
Devin has fallen off the fatal cliff — only in a final tag scene that’s itself
become an annoying Lifetime cliché, he turns up alive at the end, going to the
University of Washington in Seattle and hitting on yet another girl, Chelsea
(Ashton Smiley), who reminds him of his earlier love … It’s one of those
Lifetime movies in which the poor actors do what they can with under-motivated
characters going through clichéd situations, and one can’t help but wonder why
Emily actually goes for Devin sexually — maybe it’s because he looks like her
late boyfriend Steve’s older brother; in fact, for some reason casting director
Jeff Hardwick came up with three male leads who look enough like each other one could imagine casting them as a family, with Ben Reed as the father and
Charles Hittinger and whoever played Steve as his sons. There’s nothing really wrong with Bad Tutor except the sense that we’ve seen it all before and
the writers had written it all before!
