by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime movie was billed as a “premiere”
(though its imdb.com page lists a release date of January 18, 2018) of
something called Evil Doctor, which had
looked more promising in Lifetime’s promos than it turned out to be. It had a
weirdly assorted set of credits that seemed to indicate some (East) Indian
involvement in this production — though, alas, it did not end with a big musical production number the way
Bollywood productions tend to even if they’re otherwise not musicals —
including a producer billed only as “Dureyshevar” and a “supervising post
producer’ named Jainardhain Sathvan, along with three people named Nasser (“Nasser Productions, Inc.” was
listed as the producing studio on the opening credits, though imdb.com credits
someone or something called “Folding Box Films”!). Evil Doctor was directed by Brian Skiba from a script by Robert
Foulkes and Jennifer Goldson, and judging from the results it seems as if
Foulkes and Goldson deliberately set out to take every Lifetime cliché they
could think of and ratchet it up from a starting point at 11 to between 15 and
20.
The titular “evil doctor” is a woman OB/GYN specialist, Dr. Natalie Bornsen
(Dina Meyer), and the story begins with a confusing flashback in which almost
as soon as baby Natalie is born, she’s kidnapped by a motorcycle-riding lowlife
and his girlfriend, who steal her from her real parents and raise her as their
own — until about eight years later, when her real parents find her and the man
who kidnapped her is shot and killed in a scuffle with the police. (The costume
department cladded Ellison Ashton-Ita, who played the eight-year-old Natalie,
in a pair of skin-tight white pants that seemed awfully sexy for someone
playing an eight-year-old, as if they wanted to induce fantasies in all the straight male
pedophiles out there.) It turns out she was better off with her abductor than
her real parents: though they were considerably more affluent than the
trailer-park trash who made off with her, they were even more immoral: dad
molested Natalie regularly and mom spent all her time too stoned on crack to
notice or care. Of course we don’t learn all this until much later in the film:
the prologue showing little Natalie being kidnapped cuts to a title reading “Present Day,” and in the present day
Matt Lewis (Corin Nemec, considerably more butch and appealing than the usual
tall, lanky, sandy-haired guys who play husbands on Lifetime), who’s making
good money as the creator and show runner for a TV sitcom called Family
Phun (that’s the way the title is spelled
on the logo, which will give you an idea of the level of “humor,” if I may use
the term for courtesy, contained in the show itself) and his wife Aubrey (Jen
Lewis) are expecting their first child. Aubrey is really anxious about the
pregnancy because, like so many mothers-to-be on Lifetime who end up in the
clutches of crazy pediatricians/nurses/midwives/surrogates/whatever, she’s
already been pregnant but lost the child in a miscarriage.
They’ve already got
an obstetrician/gynecologist lined up, Dr. Flickman (Rico Simonni), but Megan
(Terrah Bennett Smith), a Black woman who works on Family Phun with Matt, recommends Dr. Natalie Bornsen to them
instead. Accordingly the Lewises transfer the case to Dr. Bornsen — who we see casting lascivious eyes at both Lewises (one
added quirk Foulkes and Goldson put into the Lifetime formula this time around
is that the villainess is Bisexual) though the Lewises, of course, remain
oblivious — and everything goes well until one night Matt gets horny and
decides to have sex with his wife. Since she’s already pregnant, he doesn’t
have to worry about that, but in
the morning she notices blood on her sheets and calls Dr. Bornsen about it. The
not-so-good doctor tells her she has an unnaturally short cervix and any
further stress on it, including sexual activity, is just going to make it even
shorter and run the risk of inducing another miscarriage. So she orders Aubrey
to stay in bed 24/7 (she can get up and move around the house for half-hour
stretches at a time, and she can use the bathroom normally instead of having to
rely on a bedpan, but that’s the extent of her “freedom”) and avoid anything that might stress her or her body out. Of course,
it’s all B.S.: Natalie’s real
plan is to stalk Matt while at the same time inducing such a state of sexual
frustration in him that he’ll yield to her seduction when she’s ready to make
her move. Until then she’s a typically solicitous Lifetime villainess, even
giving the Lewises a little electronic object to put in their bedroom — which
anyone who’s seen more than about three Lifetime movies will know really contains a bug that monitors the activity in their
bedroom (such as it is) and allows Bornsen to look in on them from her laptop
at her home.
Bornsen also keeps a rattlesnake in a glass cage in her bedroom,
and remembering Anton Chekhov’s rule of dramatic construction that if you
introduce a pistol during Act I you have to have it go off in Act III, I
assumed the writers were leading us up to a big action climax at Bornsen’s home
in which the rattlesnake would escape and take her out à la another murderous physician in literature, Dr.
Grimesby Roylott in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Speckled Band.” No such luck,
though; the only time the rattlesnake makes another appearance is when Matt
Lewis finally does get seduced
into Dr. Bornsen’s bed, then falls asleep and wakes up in the morning, realizes
he hasn’t been home and he has to throw on yesterday’s clothes and make a quick
getaway, and in a later encounter at her home (where he’d gone to break things
off) he finds that the snake is menacing him so he can’t leave out the normal
door to the second-floor bedroom but has to escape out the window, climb down
as best he can and risk injuring himself on the jump when he finally lets go
and lands on the ground below. (The fact that Natalie has had a confrontation
with him and shot him up with a narcotic doesn’t help — even though the drug
merely makes him sluggish and doesn’t incapacitate him, probably because she
was jabbing him with the needle wherever she could and didn’t get it into a
vein or muscle — enabling him, after she’s stolen his car, to steal hers, since
it’s a convertible and she has conveniently left the keys in it.) Like a lot of Lifetime villains of both (mainstream) genders
before her, Dr. Bornsen seems reasonably capable at the beginning but becomes
more floridly evil as the story progresses (in the manner of a disease). When
an older woman spies her and Matt making out in a parking lot, she turns out to
be Dr. Bornsen’s biological mother, whom she’s been paying off to keep her
quiet about her background, and later on she shows up at the motel where mom is
staying (mom has conveniently not only told her the location but let her know
how long she’ll be staying there and even given her the plastic card that
passes for a room key these days), drowns mom in the bathtub and then hangs her
body to make the scene look like a suicide.
Later she ends up naked in her own
bathtub with Violet, who has some sort of involvement with Family
Phun — for which Natalie has offered
herself as a consultant, suggesting a story arc in which the series’ leading
woman gets pregnant, has all sorts of hilarious complications, and finally ends
up on the operating table with a complicated birth in which her attending
physician has to decide whether to save the mom or the baby (“and of course she
saves the baby,” she says with a mad twinkle that gives away her own future
plans), which of course the studio rejects as not a suitable season-ending
episode for a comedy. Natalie and Violet are going at each other with a
feverish intensity — Evil Doctor
had already had two quite hot soft-core straight porn scene and now we were getting one between two
women — when Violet innocently asks if Natalie has ever wanted children. “I
can’t have children,” she snaps, and then really snaps when Violet keeps pushing the point and
Natalie responds by showing her the secret video she made of her and Matt
having sex. Then Natalie draws a gun on Violet and shoots her in the bathtub.
(Don’t ever get in a bathtub near
or around this woman!) One finds oneself asking, “Just how is she going to fake
this one to make it look like
suicide?” By the time the movie speeds to the inevitable action close it’s
become apparent that Natalie seized on Matt as her paramour because he looked
like her late father — not her real one, but the guy who kidnapped her and
raised her the first eight years until the cops blew him away — and her plan is
a real-life version of the one she outlined for Matt’s sitcom: kill Aubrey on
the operating table, claim she had to do so to save the baby, and end up as
Matt’s wife and the baby’s mom. The one person standing in her way in all of
this is Aubrey’s sister Vicky (Lindsay Hartley), who never liked Matt (though
the hint is that way back when she had a crush on him and was pissed when he
ended up marrying her sister instead), who discovers Matt’s affair with Natalie
and who convinces Aubrey to fire Natalie as her doctor and have Dr. Flickman
(Anna Russell moment: “Ya remember Dr. Flickman?”) deliver her baby instead.
Only Aubrey’s water
breaks while she and her sister are still at home, Vicky rushes her to the
hospital as an emergency patient, and Natalie grabs a tire iron and wallops both Vicky and Flickman, knocking them out, so she can
take over delivery of Aubrey’s baby (a girl — the Lewises hadn’t wanted to know
in advance because they had expected a son last time, and even named him
Theodore, and they decided this time around that advance knowledge of the
baby’s gender would jinx them) and then steal the child. She and Matt confront
each other on the roof, she’s about to make her way down the fire escape with
the baby, we get some nice insert shots of a part of the fire escape with a
missing bolt on it — a good bit of suspense editing from director Skiba, who’s
otherwise pretty much been on autopilot as Dina Meyer not only chewed the
scenery but swallowed it whole and then vomited it out again. Matt pretends to
be willing to run off with her in order to get the baby out of her clutches,
and no sooner has Natalie handed the baby over than the fire escape gives way
and she falls to her death. The final scene is a bit off the Lifetime norm in
that Aubrey and her sister Vicky seem to have decided to raise the baby by
themselves; Matt comes by rather sheepishly to see his daughter, and instead of
forgiving him and taking him back into the family, Aubrey basically tells him
off and makes clear to him it’s going to take her a long time, if ever, before she can forgive him for having
that affair. Evil Doctor is a
peculiar movie that takes all the Lifetime clichés and ramps them up so
extensively it achieves a sort of bizarre neo-camp entertainment value: you wonder
what direction the story is going to go in next, and even when it takes a
predictable turn you still are
astonished at the white-hot level of intensity with which writers Foulkes and
Goldson and director Skiba are throwing the time-tested Lifetime clichés at
you.
